Converting Twitter's date format to Datetime in python

Question

date time format returned by Twitter is in this form:

Thu Apr 23 13:38:19 +0000 2009

I want it in datetime format for database enty and query...

Answer 1

EDIT - 13 Apr 15 As suggested, please use.

 datetime.strptime('Thu Apr 23 13:38:19 +0000 2009','%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y').replace(tzinfo=pytz.UTC)

Now, if you want work much on the Date parsing and playing around with Date Time strings, use Babel or python-dateutil

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Please ignore the suggestion below

I have not been working much on Python lately, but this should do the trick.

>>>from datetime import datetime
>>>d = datetime.strptime('Thu Apr 23 13:38:19 +0000 2009','%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y');
>>>print d.strftime('%Y-%m-%d');

This is based on Python Doc and SO

Answer 2

Assuming your data is stored in a data frame "df" and the time for the tweet is stored in the "created_at" column. you can do:

df["created_at"] = df["created_at"].astype('datetime64[ns]') 
df["created_at"] = df.created_at.dt.to_pydatetime()