How to convert strings to datetime objects in Python?

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In today’s quick tutorial we’ll learn how to easily transform string objects to datetime objects.

We’ll look into three main topics:

  • Transform a simple string to datetimes.
  • Convert a list of strings to a list of datetime objects
  • Troubleshooting the module not found strptime error

Strings to date times in Python 3

The function datetime.datetime provides method strptime() which can help us to parse strings that contain date information and transform them into datetime objects.

# define a string object
date_str = '1/14/11'

# convert to datetime
import datetime
my_full_date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y')
my_date =  datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y').date()
my_year = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y').year
my_month = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y').month

# print the dates, year and month
print("The full date is: " + str(my_full_date))
print("The shortened date is: " + str(my_date))
print("The year is: " + str(my_year))
print("The month is: " + str(my_month))

The result will be:

The full date is: 2011-01-14 00:00:00
The shortened date is: 2011-01-14
The year is: 2011
The month is: 1

Transforming a list of strings to datetime objects

In a similar fashion we can leverage a list comprehension in order to process an entire list of strings and convert them to dates in one go.

# define your list
my_date_list = [ '01/14', '03/17', '04/07', '09/15']

#list comprehension
my_date_list_dt = [datetime.datetime.strptime(date,'%m/%d').date() for date in my_date_list]
# print the list
print(my_date_list_dt)

And here is our result:

[datetime.date(1900, 1, 14), datetime.date(1900, 3, 17), datetime.date(1900, 4, 7), datetime.date(1900, 9, 15)]

Fix the No module found datetime error

I have noted that people often invoke the datetime.strptime() method in the following way:

import datetime
my_full_date = datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y')

This will lead to a modulenotfound error.

The proper way to call the strptime method is as following:


my_full_date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y')

Or alternatively, import the datetime.datetime module:

from datetime import datetime
my_full_date = datetime.strptime(date_str,'%m/%d/%y')

Converting to date objects in Pandas