Converting (YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM:SS) date time

Question

I want to convert a string like this "29-Apr-2013-15:59:02" into something more usable.

The dashes can be easily replaced with spaces or other characters. This format would be ideal: "YYYYMMDD HH:mm:ss (20130429 15:59:02)".

Edit:

Sorry, I did not specifically see the answer in another post. But again, I'm ignorant so could have been looking at the solution and didn't know it. I've got this working, but I wouldn't consider it "pretty."

#29-Apr-2013-15:59:02

import sys, datetime, time

#inDate = sys.argv[1]
inDate = 29-Apr-2013-15:59:02

def getMonth(month):
    monthDict = {'Jan':'01','Feb':'02','Mar':'03','Apr':'04','May':'05','Jun':'06','Jul':'07','Aug':'08','Sep':'09','Oct':'10','Nov':'11','Dec':'12'}
    for k, v in monthDict.iteritems():
        if month == k:
            return v

day = inDate[:2]
#print day
month = inDate[3:6]
#print month
year = inDate[7:11]
#print year
time = inDate[-8:]
#print time

newDate = year+getMonth(month)+day
newDateTime = newDate+" "+time

print newDate
print newDateTime

Any thoughts on improving?

Answer 1

You want to look into datetime, in particular strptime.

Answer 2

Use datetime.strptime() to parse the inDate string into a date object, use datetime.strftime() to output in whatever format you like:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> inDate = "29-Apr-2013-15:59:02"
>>> d = datetime.strptime(inDate, "%d-%b-%Y-%H:%M:%S")
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2013, 4, 29, 15, 59, 2)
>>> d.strftime("YYYYMMDD HH:mm:ss (%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S)")
'YYYYMMDD HH:mm:ss (20130429 15:59:02)'

Answer 3

Have you investigated dateutil?

http://labix.org/python-dateutil

I found a similar question to yours: How do I translate a ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object?