How to parse time string without date and date string without time?

Question

Is there any way to automatically parse strings with time only to datetime.time object (or something similar)? Same for datetime.date.

I've tried dateutil, arrow, moment, pandas.to_datetime. All these parsers create timestamps with a current date.

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse('23:53')
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 8, 23, 53)  # datetime.time(23, 53) expected
>>> parse('2018-01-04')
datetime.datetime(2018, 1, 4, 0, 0)  # datetime.date(2018, 1, 4) expected

UPD:

Thanks for the responses. Think that I should clarify the problem.

The program doesn't know what will be in the input (timestamp, date or time), and it should decide to set appropriate type. The problem is to distinguish these types.

For example, I can parse 23:53 and get a timestamp. How can I decide to extract the time from it or not?

Answer 1

You can use fromisoformat() from datetime.

import datetime
datetime.time.fromisoformat('23:53')
datetime.date.fromisoformat('2018-01-04')