Converting string into datetime

Question

Short and simple. I've got a huge list of date-times like this as strings:

Jun 1 2005  1:33PM
Aug 28 1999 12:00AM

I'm going to be shoving these back into proper datetime fields in a database so I need to magic them into real datetime objects.

Any help (even if it's just a kick in the right direction) would be appreciated.

Edit: This is going through Django's ORM so I can't use SQL to do the conversion on insert.

Answer 1

run this in query analyser/SSMS

select convert(datetime,'Aug 28 1999 12:00AM')
select convert(datetime,'Jun 1 2005  1:33PM')

Answer 2

Check out strptime in the time module. It is the inverse of strftime.

Answer 3

from datetime import datetime

date_object = datetime.strptime('Jun 1 2005  1:33PM', '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p')

Link to the Python documentation for strptime

and a link for the strftime format mask

Answer 4

Use the third party dateutil library:

from dateutil import parser
dt = parser.parse("Aug 28 1999 12:00AM")

It can handle most date formats, including the one you need to parse. It's more convenient than strptime as it can guess the correct format most of the time.