Parsing dates with multiple formats

Question

The dates returned by imaplib are in the following format:

  dates = [
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 13:13:02 -0300 (ART)',
  'Tue, 28 May 2019 00:28:31 +0800 (CST)',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 18:32:13 +0200',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 18:43:13 +0200',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 19:00:11 +0200',
  '27 May 2019 18:54:58 +0100',
  '27 May 2019 18:56:02 +0100',
  'Mon, 03 Jun 2019 10:19:56 GMT',
  '4 Jun 2019 07:46:30 +0100',
  'Mon, 03 Jun 2019 18:48:01 +0200',
  '5 Jun 2019 10:39:19 +0100'
]

How can I convert these into say, BST datetimes?

Here's what I've tried so far:

def date_parse(date):
  try:
    return datetime.strptime(date, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z')
  except ValueError:
    try:
      return datetime.strptime(date[:-6], '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z')
    except ValueError:
      try:
        return datetime.strptime(date[:-6], '%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')
      except ValueError:
        return datetime.strptime(date[:-4], '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')

for date in dates:
    print(date)
    parsed_date = date_parse(date)
    print(parsed_date, type(parsed_date))
    print('')

However I get dates repeated followed by an Traceback (most recent call last): error.

What is the best way to clean these dates? Is there a imaplib/email function that allows us to return clean dates automatically?

AK91 · Answer 1 · 2020-05-28T03:26:25.357

parse function from dateutil.parser did the trick:

from dateutil.parser import parse

dates = [
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 13:13:02 -0300 (ART)',
  'Tue, 28 May 2019 00:28:31 +0800 (CST)',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 18:32:13 +0200',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 18:43:13 +0200',
  'Mon, 27 May 2019 19:00:11 +0200',
  '27 May 2019 18:54:58 +0100',
  '27 May 2019 18:56:02 +0100',
  'Mon, 03 Jun 2019 10:19:56 GMT',
  '4 Jun 2019 07:46:30 +0100',
  'Mon, 03 Jun 2019 18:48:01 +0200',
  '5 Jun 2019 10:39:19 +0100'
]

for date in dates:
    print(date, type(date))
    print(parse(date), type(parse(date)))
    print('')

Parsing dates with multiple formats

1 Answers1