Fastest way to insert these dashes in python string?

Question

So I know Python strings are immutable, but I have a string:

c[\'date\'] = \"20110104\"

Which I would like to convert to

c[\'da         


        

Answer 1

I am not sure if you want to convert it to a proper datetime object or rather just hard code the format, you can do the following:

from datetime import datetime
result = datetime.strptime(c['date'], '%Y%m%d')
print result.date().isoformat()

Input: '20110104'

Output: '2011-01-04'

Answer 2

I'd probably do so this way, not that there's a great deal of gain:

d = c['date']
c['date'] = '%s-%s-%s' % (d[:4], d[4:6], d[6:])

The big improvement (imho) is avoiding string concatenation.