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I have a string that contains the date in this format: full_date = "May.02.1982"

I want to use datetime.strptime() to display the date in all digits like: "1982-05-02"

Here's what I tried:

full_date1 = datetime.strptime(full_date, "%Y-%m-%d")

When I try to print this, I get garbage values like built-in-67732 Where am I going wrong? Does the strptime() method not accept string values?

Krithika Raghavendran
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1 Answers1

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Your format string is wrong, it should be this:

In [65]:

full_date = "May.02.1982"
import datetime as dt
dt.datetime.strptime(full_date, '%b.%d.%Y')
Out[65]:
datetime.datetime(1982, 5, 2, 0, 0)

You then need to call strftime on a datetime object to get the string format you desire:

In [67]:

dt.datetime.strptime(full_date, '%b.%d.%Y').strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
Out[67]:
'1982-05-02'

strptime is for creating a datetime format from a string, not to reformat a string to another datetime string.

So you need to create a datetime object using strptime, then call strftime to create a string from the datetime object.

The datetime format strings can be found in the docs as well as an explanation of strptime and strftime

EdChum
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    I suggest to add a list of directives for operating with datetime: https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior – wanderlust May 12 '15 at 07:58