Convert a string containing a date into datetime in Python

David Y.

—March 15, 2023

The ProblemThe Problem

How can I convert a string containing a date to a datetime object in Python? The format looks like this:

Feb 2 2020  2:05PM

The SolutionThe Solution

The datetime object includes a method called strptime(), which parses strings according to a provided format and returns a matching timezone-naive datetime object. A format is a string assembled from format codes.

To convert the string in our problem, our code might look like this:

from datetime import datetime

my_datetime_string = 'Feb 2 2020  2:05PM'
datetime_format = '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p'

my_datetime = datetime.strptime(my_datetime_string, datetime_format)

print(my_datetime) # will produce "2020-02-02 14:05:00"