What are the differences between "import dateutil.parser" and "from dateutil.parser import parse"?

Question

Update:

I am sorry for my careless, mixing up the word parse and parser. This question should be deleted. But since someone answered it and received reputations, I kept it here. Sorry again.

What are the differences between (import dateutil.parser)

>>> import dateutil.parser
>>> t = dateutil.parser.parser("2012-01-19 17:21:00 BRST")
>>> type(t)
<class 'dateutil.parser.parser'>

and (from dateutil.parser import parse)

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> t = parse("2012-01-19 17:21:00 BRST")
>>> type(t)
<type 'datetime.datetime'>

Can anyone explain the differences between import dateutil.parser and from dateutil.parser import parse?

you're not calling the same function ... – MMF Nov 25 '16 at 17:00 — MMF, Nov 25 '16 at 17:00
@MMF, thx for pointing out this. sorry for my carefuless. – SparkAndShine Nov 25 '16 at 17:05 — SparkAndShine, Nov 25 '16 at 17:05

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 25 '16 at 16:58

The problem is that you are actually calling the constructor for the parser object, not the parse method. You can either call dateutil.parser.parse or instantiate a dateutil.parser.parser object and call its parse() method.

>>> import dateutil.parser
>>> t = dateutil.parser.parse("2012-01-19 17:21:00 BRST")
>>> type(t)
datetime.datetime
>>> t
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 19, 17, 21)

Generally you can construct a parser object with a dateutil.parser.parserinfo object, but since you're not actually using the parser object, it's not throwing an error when it detects that you've passed it a string instead.

What are the differences between "import dateutil.parser" and "from dateutil.parser import parse"?

1 Answers1