Python/Regex - How to extract date from filename using regular expression?

Question

I need to use python to extract the date from filenames. The date is in the following format:

month-day-year.somefileextension

Examples:

Answer 1

I think you can extract the date using re.split as follows

$ ipython

In [1]: import re

In [2]: input_file = '10-12-2011.zip'

In [3]: file_split = re.split('(\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})', input_file, 1)

In [4]: file_split
Out[4]: ['', '10-12-2011', '.zip']

In [5]: file_split[1]
Out[5]: '10-12-2011'

In [6]: input_file = 'somedatabase-10-04-2011.sql.tar.gz'

In [7]: file_split = re.split('(\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})', input_file, 1)

In [8]: file_split
Out[8]: ['somedatabase-', '10-04-2011', '.sql.tar.gz']

In [9]: file_split[1]
Out[9]: '10-04-2011'

I ran the tests with Python 3.6.6, IPython 5.3.0