Extracting date from a string in Python

Question

How can I extract the date from a string like "monkey 2010-07-10 love banana"? Thanks!

Answer 1

Using python-dateutil:

In [1]: import dateutil.parser as dparser  In [18]: dparser.parse("monkey 2010-07-10 love banana",fuzzy=True) Out[18]: datetime.datetime(2010, 7, 10, 0, 0) 

Invalid dates raise a ValueError:

In [19]: dparser.parse("monkey 2010-07-32 love banana",fuzzy=True) # ValueError: day is out of range for month 

It can recognize dates in many formats:

In [20]: dparser.parse("monkey 20/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True) Out[20]: datetime.datetime(1980, 1, 20, 0, 0) 

Note that it makes a guess if the date is ambiguous:

In [23]: dparser.parse("monkey 10/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True) Out[23]: datetime.datetime(1980, 10, 1, 0, 0) 

But the way it parses ambiguous dates is customizable:

In [21]: dparser.parse("monkey 10/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True, dayfirst=True) Out[21]: datetime.datetime(1980, 1, 10, 0, 0) 

Answer 2

If the date is given in a fixed form, you can simply use a regular expression to extract the date and "datetime.datetime.strptime" to parse the date:

import re from datetime import datetime  match = re.search(r'\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}', text) date = datetime.strptime(match.group(), '%Y-%m-%d').date() 

Otherwise, if the date is given in an arbitrary form, you can't extract it easily.