Let's say you've got a list of strings that represent dates in an inconsistent format.
date_strings = [
"March 12 2010",
"2010-03-12",
"03/12/2010 12:42:12"
]
You'd like to parse the dates out but you can't use the standard datetime
formatter. Before doing it by hand, you might want to try out datefinder
first.
import datefinder
[list(datefinder.find_dates(d)) for d in date_strings]
# [[datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 12, 0, 0)],
# [datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 12, 0, 0)],
# [datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 12, 12, 42, 12)]]
The datefinder.find_dates
function works great a lot of the time! But we
need to remember that it isn't perfect. It still needs to "guess" what the
correct format is.
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