How to match arbitrary characters in a str when formatting datetime in Python?

Question

I want to convert a string to a datetime in Python. But there are some characters, which are irrelevant in the String.

Is the official document, there is no clear way to match arbitrary characters in the String.

For example, I have a String 2018-01-01Ajrwoe.

I want to convert this string into a datetime as 2018 (year) 01 (month) and 01 (day).

The rest of this string is irrelevant.

I know that I can change the string (remove the irrelevant characters) first like

raw_str = "2018-01-01Ajrwoe"
my_str = raw_str[:10]
strptime(my_str, my_format)

raw_str = "2018-01-01Ajrwoe"
strptime(raw_str, my_format)

Thanks in advance.

Possible duplicate of datetime strptime - set format to ignore trailing part of string — wilkben
– wilkben, Commented Aug 22, 2019 at 12:24

vlemaistre · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-22 12:27:14Z

1

Here is a way to do it using a regex to clean your string :

raw_str = "2018-01-01Ajrwoe"

datetime.datetime.strptime(re.sub('[a-z|A-Z]', '', raw_str), '%Y-%m-%d')

Output :

datetime.datetime(2018, 1, 1, 0, 0)

answered Aug 22, 2019 at 12:27

vlemaistre

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Comments

Lufftre · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-22 12:25:47Z

0

You could match the date using a regex.

For example:

import re
raw_str = "2018-01-01Ajrwoe"
match = re.search(r'\d+-\d+-\d+', raw_str)
print(match.group(0))

answered Aug 22, 2019 at 12:25

Lufftre

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