How to convert a Python date string to a date object?

In this article we convert a date string to a date object. We use the strptime() method to convert a date string to a date object.

Strptime()

The strptime() method takes the date as an input and converts it into a date object. Note that you cannot convert any string into a datetime object. The string should be in a certain format.

Syntax

The syntax of the strptime() method is shown in this section.

datetime.strptime(time_data, format_data)

Where,

time_date – it is the time present in string format.

format_date – it is the data(string) present in datetime format which is converted from time_data using this function.

Few important format codes

Example 1

In the following example we convert a string date to a datetime object by using the strptime. And we also extract the microsecond, minutes, and seconds.

from datetime import datetime
time_data = "23/01/01 04:35:7.123"
format_data = "%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S.%f"
date = datetime.strptime(time_data, format_data)
print("Microsecond:",date.microsecond)
print("Hour:",date.hour)
print("Minute:",date.minute)
print("Second:",date.second)
print("The date is:",date)

Output

The output received is as follows.

Microsecond: 123000
Hour: 4
Minute: 35
Second: 7
The date is: 2001-01-23 04:35:07.123000

Example 2

The module is imported in this first example, and the input DateTime string is provided. Now we use the strptime() method to get the needed format and date() to retrieve the date from DateTime.

import datetime
date_str = '29122017' # The date - 29 Dec 2017
format_str = '%d%m%Y' # The format
datetime_obj = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str, format_str)
print(datetime_obj.date())

Output

The output produced is shown below.

2017-12-29