Django string to date format

Question

I want to convert my string date to django date format. I tried a method. but did not work.

date = datetime.datetime.strptime(request.POST.get(\'date\'),\"         


        

Answer 1

It should be %Y-%m-%d:

>>> s = "2014-04-07"
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(s, "%Y-%m-%d").date()
datetime.date(2014, 4, 7)

According to the documentation:

• %Y stands for a year with century as a decimal number
• %m - month as a zero-padded decimal number
• %d - day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

It might be convenient to use django's dateparse in this case.

from django.utils.dateparse import parse_date
date_str = request.POST.get('date')
date = parse_date(date_str)

Answer 3

django.utils.dateparse.parse_date function will return None if given date not in %Y-%m-%d format

I have not found a function in django source code to parse string by DATE_INPUT_FORMATS. So I wrote a custom helper function for that and I have added to here for help others.

from datetime import datetime
from django.utils.formats import get_format

def parse_date(date_str):
    """Parse date from string by DATE_INPUT_FORMATS of current language"""
    for item in get_format('DATE_INPUT_FORMATS'):
        try:
            return datetime.strptime(date_str, item).date()
        except (ValueError, TypeError):
            continue

    return None