Parsing dates and times with dateutil

If you need to parse dates and times in Python, there is no better library than dateutil. The parser module can parse datetime strings in many more formats than can be shown here, while the tz module provides everything you need for looking up timezones. When combined, these modules make it quite easy to parse strings into timezone-aware datetime objects.

Getting ready

You can install dateutil using pip or easy_install, that is, sudo pip install dateutil==2.0 or sudo easy_install dateutil==2.0. You need the 2.0 version for Python 3 compatibility. The complete documentation can be found at http://labix.org/python-dateutil.

How to do it...

Let's dive into a few parsing examples:

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse('Thu Sep 25 10:36:28 2010')
datetime.datetime(2010, 9, 25, 10, 36, 28)
>>> parser.parse('Thursday, 25. September 2010 10:36AM')
datetime.datetime(2010, 9, 25, 10, 36)
>>> parser.parse('9/25/2010 10...