Datetime strptime in python

Question

I\'ve tried the following code :

import datetime
d = datetime.datetime.strptime(\"01/27/2012\", \"%m/%d/%Y\")
print(d)

and the output is :

Answer 1

There is a difference between datetime.strp[arse]time() and datetime.strf[ormat]time().

The first one, strptime() allows you to create a date object from a string source, provided you can tell it what format to expect:

strDate = "11-Apr-2019_09:15:42"
dateObj = datetime.strptime(strDate, "%d-%b-%Y_%H:%M%S")

print(dateObj)  # shows: 2019-04-11 09:15:42

The second one, strftime() allows you to export your date object to a string in the format of your choosing:

dateObj = datetime(2019, 4, 11, 9, 19, 25)
strDate = dateObj.strftime("%m/%d/%y %H:%M:%S")

print(strDate)  # shows: 04/11/19 09:19:25

What you're seeing is simply the default string format of a datetime object because you didn't explicitly tell it what format to use.

Checkout http://strftime.org/ for a list of all the different string format options that are availble.