Python

Parse datetime strings in Python with dateutil

Did you know?

You can use dateutil.parser to parse all sorts of different date and datetime string formats.

https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

An example👇

from dateutil.parser import parse

print(parse("2012-01-19 17:21:00"))
# => 2012-01-19 17:21:00

print(parse("1st Jan, 2019"))
# => 2019-01-01 00:00:00

print(parse("23.11.2020"))
# => 2020-11-23 00:00:00

Unfortunately, this is quite slow:

from dateutil.parser import parse
%timeit parse(datetime_txt).date()
54.3 µs ± 450 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

import datetime
%timeit datetime.datetime.strptime(datetime_txt, "%H:%M %d-%m-%Y").date()
7.44 µs ± 240 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)