将不同的日期格式转换为日期时间

Question

How do I check a body text for different date formats and convert it into datetime format? The body of text could be:
May 6 2014 (can use parser here)
Tue May 6 2014
mm/dd/yyyy , yyyy/mm/dd etc
yyyy:dd::mm, mm:dd:yyyy
and so on.
Is there an easy way to check what format the date is in ?

Answer 1

python-dateutil module is pretty good at parsing datetime strings in different formats:

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse('May 6 2014')
datetime.datetime(2014, 5, 6, 0, 0)
>>> parser.parse('Tue May 6 2014')
datetime.datetime(2014, 5, 6, 0, 0)

Also see:

• datetime from string in Python, best-guessing string format
• Extracting date from a string in Python