Parse date string and change format

Question

I have a date string with the format \'Mon Feb 15 2010\'. I want to change the format to \'15/02/2010\'. How can I do this?

Answer 1

As this question comes often, here is the simple explanation.

datetime or time module has two important functions.

• strftime - creates a string representation of date or time from a datetime or time object.
• strptime - creates a datetime or time object from a string.

In both cases, we need a formating string. It is the representation that tells how the date or time is formatted in your string.

Now lets assume we have a date object.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> d = datetime(2010, 2, 15)
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 15, 0, 0)

If we want to create a string from this date in the format 'Mon Feb 15 2010'

>>> s = d.strftime('%a %b %d %y')
>>> print s
Mon Feb 15 10

Lets assume we want to convert this s again to a datetime object.

>>> new_date = datetime.strptime(s, '%a %b %d %y')
>>> print new_date
2010-02-15 00:00:00

Refer This document all formatting directives regarding datetime.