Parse date string and change format

I have a date string with the format ‘Mon Feb 15 2010′. I want to change the format to ’15/02/2010’. How can I do this?

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

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'
>>>

Method 2

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

Method 3

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

Method 4

>>> 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'

Method 5

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.

Method 6

@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

Method 7

Just for the sake of completion: when parsing a date using strptime() and the date contains the name of a day, month, etc, be aware that you have to account for the locale.

It’s mentioned as a footnote in the docs as well.

As an example:

import locale
print(locale.getlocale())

>> ('nl_BE', 'ISO8859-1')

from datetime import datetime
datetime.strptime('6-Mar-2016', '%d-%b-%Y').strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

>> ValueError: time data '6-Mar-2016' does not match format '%d-%b-%Y'

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US')
datetime.strptime('6-Mar-2016', '%d-%b-%Y').strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

>> '2016-03-06'

Method 8

You may achieve this using pandas as well:

import pandas as pd

pd.to_datetime('Mon Feb 15 2010', format='%a %b %d %Y').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')

Output:

'15/02/2010'

You may apply pandas approach for different datatypes as:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

def reformat_date(date_string, old_format, new_format):
    return pd.to_datetime(date_string, format=old_format, errors='ignore').strftime(new_format)

date_string = 'Mon Feb 15 2010'
date_list = ['Mon Feb 15 2010', 'Wed Feb 17 2010']
date_array = np.array(date_list)
date_series = pd.Series(date_list)

old_format = '%a %b %d %Y'
new_format = '%d/%m/%Y'

print(reformat_date(date_string, old_format, new_format))
print(reformat_date(date_list, old_format, new_format).values)
print(reformat_date(date_array, old_format, new_format).values)
print(date_series.apply(lambda x: reformat_date(x, old_format, new_format)).values)

Output:

15/02/2010
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']

Method 9

use datetime library
http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html look up 9.1.7.
especiall strptime() strftime() Behavior¶
examples
http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/datesandtimes.html

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0