Parse date string and change format

Question

datetime module could help you with that:

datetime.datetime.strptime(date_string, format1).strftime(format2)

For the specific example you could do

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Mon Feb 15 2010', '%a %b %d %Y').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')
'15/02/2010'
>>>

You can install the dateutil library. Its parse function can figure out what format a string is in without having to specify the format like you do with datetime.strptime.

from dateutil.parser import parse
dt = parse('Mon Feb 15 2010')
print(dt)
# datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 15, 0, 0)
print(dt.strftime('%d/%m/%Y'))
# 15/02/2010

convert string to datetime object

from datetime import datetime
s = "2016-03-26T09:25:55.000Z"
f = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ"
out = datetime.strptime(s, f)
print(out)
output:
2016-03-26 09:25:55

>>> from_date="Mon Feb 15 2010"
>>> import time                
>>> conv=time.strptime(from_date,"%a %b %d %Y")
>>> time.strftime("%d/%m/%Y",conv)
'15/02/2010'

As this question comes often, here is the simple explanation.

datetime or time module has two important functions.

• strftime - creates a string representation of date or time from a datetime or time object.
• strptime - creates a datetime or time object from a string.

In both cases, we need a formating string. It is the representation that tells how the date or time is formatted in your string.

Now lets assume we have a date object.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> d = datetime(2010, 2, 15)
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 15, 0, 0)

If we want to create a string from this date in the format 'Mon Feb 15 2010'

>>> s = d.strftime('%a %b %d %y')
>>> print s
Mon Feb 15 10

Lets assume we want to convert this s again to a datetime object.

>>> new_date = datetime.strptime(s, '%a %b %d %y')
>>> print new_date
2010-02-15 00:00:00

Refer This document all formatting directives regarding datetime.

@codeling and @user1767754 : The following two lines will work. I saw no one posted the complete solution for the example problem that was asked. Hopefully this is enough explanation.

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime.strptime("Mon Feb 15 2010", "%a %b %d %Y").strftime("%d/%m/%Y")
print(x)

Output:

15/02/2010