How can I parse multiple (unknown) date formats in python?

Question

I have a bunch of excel documents I am extracting dates from. I am trying to convert these to a standard format so I can put them in a database. Is there a function I can th

Answer 1

The third-party module dateutil has a function parse that operates similarly to PHP's strtotime: you don't need to specify a particular date format, it just tries a bunch of its own.

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse("10/02/09", fuzzy=True)
datetime.datetime(2009, 10, 2, 0, 0)  # default to be in American date format

It also allows you to specify different assumptions:

• dayfirst – Whether to interpret the first value in an ambiguous 3-integer date (e.g. 01/05/09) as the day (True) or month (False). If yearfirst is set to True, this distinguishes between YDM and YMD. If set to None, this value is retrieved from the current parserinfo object (which itself defaults to False).
• yearfirst – Whether to interpret the first value in an ambiguous 3-integer date (e.g. 01/05/09) as the year. If True, the first number is taken to be the year, otherwise the last number is taken to be the year. If this is set to None, the value is retrieved from the current parserinfo object (which itself defaults to False).