How to format date in python

Question

I made a crawler using python.

But my crawler get date in this format:

s = page_ad.findAll('script')[25].text.replace('\'', '"')
s = re.search(r'\{.+\}', s, re.DOTALL).group() # get json data
s = re.sub(r'//.+\n', '', s) # replace comment
s = re.sub(r'\s+', '', s) # strip whitspace
s = re.sub(r',}', '}', s) # get rid of last , in the dict
dataLayer = json.loads(s)
print dataLayer["page"]["adDetail"]["adDate"]

2017-01-1412:28:07

I want only date without hours ( 2017-01-14 ), how get only date if not have white spaces?

Answer 1

use string subset:

>>> date ="2017-01-1412:28:07"

>>> datestr= date[:-8]
>>> datestr
'2017-01-14'
>>> 

Answer 2

try this code:

In [2]: from datetime import datetime

In [3]: now = datetime.now()

In [4]: now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
Out[4]: '2017-01-24'

Update

I suggest you parse the date first into datetime object and then show the relevant information out of it.

for this a better approach would be using a library for this. I use dateparser for this tasks, example usage:

import dateparser
date = dateparser.parse('12/12/12')
date.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

Answer 3

As this is not a standard date format, just slice the end.

st = "2017-01-1412:28:07"
res = st[:10]
print res

>>>2017-01-14

Answer 4

Use datetime as follows to first convert it into a datetime object, and then format the output as required using the stftime() function:

from datetime import datetime

ad_date = dataLayer["page"]["adDetail"]["adDate"]
print datetime.strptime(ad_date, "%Y-%m-%d%H:%M:%S").strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

This will print:

2017-01-14

By using this method, it would give you the flexibility to display other items, for example adding %A to the end would give you the day of the week:

print datetime.strptime(ad_date, "%Y-%m-%d%H:%M:%S").strftime("%Y-%m-%d %A")

eg

2017-01-14 Saturday