python find specific variable in string

Yes, it's very possible. Regular expressions are going to be your best friend in this situation.

For the example you gave, where you're looking for things like "xx/xx/xx" such that each 'x' is a digit, the following regular expression will do the job: \d\d[/]\d\d[/]\d\d.

Here is how it would work in Python:

import re
pattern = re.compile('\d\d[/]\d\d[/]\d\d')
pattern.findall(' sadfsd  04/06/76   kjadsf 10/10/14  ')

Try that out in your Python interpreter and you'll get a list of matching substrings:

['04/06/76', '10/10/14']

If you want to extract the day, month, and year individually, use parentheses to group those parts of the regular expression. Like so:

import re
pattern = re.compile('(\d\d)[/](\d\d)[/](\d\d)')
pattern.findall(' sadfsd  04/06/76   kjadsf 10/10/14  ')

That gets you a list of tuples:

[('04', '06', '76'), ('10', '10', '14')]