What is the replacement for dateutil.parser in python3?

Question

Python 2.x has a great function called dateutil.parser which turns an ISO8601 formatted date into a python datetime value. It's not present in Python 3. What is the replacement?

Answer 1

You should first find the exact name for the module using pip search:

pip search dateutil

Then, install the version you want (assuming py-dateutil):

pip install py-dateutil

Now, fire-up shell and import the module (pitfall: the module is not called py-dateutil):

import dateutil.parser

You should be good to go!

Answer 2

dateutil is a third party module. It has recently been ported to Python 3 with dateutil 2.0, and the parser functions was ported as well.

So the replacement is dateutil.parser. You just forgot to install it.

Answer 3

You can achieve this through the datetime module's strptime method.

>>> import datetime
>>> mydate = datetime.datetime(2002,12,4, 12, 30).isoformat()
>>> mydate
'2002-12-04T12:30:00'
>>> parsed_date = datetime.datetime.strptime( mydate, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S" )
>>> parsed_date
datetime.datetime(2002, 12, 4, 12, 30)

strptime has a flexible set of options as to parsing your date. See strftime() and strptime() Behavior for more information.