Convert date string (from gmail) to timestamp | Python - python

I want to save the received date of emails from a Gmail account into a time-series database.
The problem is that I cannot convert the string that I got from the email to timestamp.
I tried this:
from datetime import datetime
date1 = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (PDT)'
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z %Z')
print(date1_obj)
But got this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/format_date.py", line 11, in <module>
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z %Z')
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/_strptime.py", line 577, in _strptime_datetime
tt, fraction, gmtoff_fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/_strptime.py", line 359, in _strptime
(data_string, format))
ValueError: time data 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (PDT)' does not match format '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z %Z'
Tried with or without parenthesis wrapping Timezone.
Read a lot, but nothing about how to deal with date strings containing "(PDT)" or any other timezones. It's very important to get the right date... If I run the same code without "(PDT)", got an incorrect time (because of my local time).
I know I can use string methods to manipulate it and convert to a right datetime, but I feel like this would be flexible.
Sorry for my terrible English.
Thank you!

you could use dateutil's parser to parse the string, automatically inferring the format:
import dateutil
s = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (PDT)'
dt = dateutil.parser.parse(s)
# datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 28, 8, 15, 58, tzinfo=tzoffset('PDT', -25200))
dt.utcoffset().total_seconds()
# -25200.0
Note that although the timezone is given a name ("PDT"), it is only a UTC offset of 25200 s. In many cases that is sufficient, at least to convert to UTC.
If you need the specific timezone (e.g. to account for DST transitions etc.), you can use a mapping dict that you supply to dateutil.parser.parse as tzinfos:
tzmap = {'PDT': dateutil.tz.gettz('US/Pacific'),
'PST': dateutil.tz.gettz('US/Pacific')}
dt = dateutil.parser.parse(s, tzinfos=tzmap)
# datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 28, 8, 15, 58, tzinfo=tzfile('US/Pacific'))
dt.utcoffset().total_seconds()
# -25200.0

Close, you forgot to put the bracket around the last entry.
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z (%Z)')

Well, after all your answers, which were very helpful, I finally solved.
This is how:
>>> from email.utils import parsedate_tz, mktime_tz
>>> date = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (PST)'
>>> timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz(date))
>>> timestamp
1590678958
>>>
I checked that timestamp, and stands to 12:15:58 local time, what it's exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you very much to everybody who took a minute to answer.

If it does not work even if you enclose %Z in brackets then the problem lies within the %Z directive
https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html
Support for the %Z directive is based on the values contained in
tzname and whether daylight is true. Because of this, it is
platform-specific except for recognizing UTC and GMT which are always
known (and are considered to be non-daylight savings timezones).
In example the following results in a ValueError for me (in Europe)
date1 = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (PST)'
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z (%Z)')
print(date1_obj)
While with GMT it the output is 2020-05-28 08:15:58-07:00
date1 = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (GMT)'
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z (%Z)')
print(date1_obj)
Based on your comment under this answer you could split the string if the Timezone bit is not important:
date1 = 'Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:58 -0700 (GMT)'
date1_obj = datetime.strptime(date1.split(" (")[0], '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z')

Related

How to convert UTC/extended format to datetime in Python

I want to convert datetime in %Y-%m-%d,
so from Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:17:00 +0100 to 17-04-2021
def convertDatetime(data):
test_datetime = data
data_new_format = datetime.datetime.strptime(test_datetime,'%- %Y %M %d')
print(data_new_format)
convertDatetime("Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:17:00 +0100")
but it say me: '-' is a bad directive in format '%- %Y %M %d'
The format you specify '%- %Y %M %d' (1) contains an incorrect specifier - as the error says, and also (2) completely does not match the data you want to convert. The format you pass to strptime() must match the way the data looks, not the way you want it to look.
>>> data="Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:17:00 +0100"
>>> format = "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z"
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(data, format)
datetime.datetime(2021, 4, 17, 16, 17, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600)))
To reformat the datetime the way you want, you need a second call, to strftime():
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(data, format).strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
'2021-04-17'

How to fix ValueError time date does not match format when converting from string to datetime

Im trying to convert a string to datetime and keep getting the error: ValueError: time data 'Mon, 22 Apr 2019 17:04:38 +0200 (CEST)' does not match format '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z %Z'
from datetime import datetime
s = "Mon, 22 Apr 2019 17:04:38 +0200 (CEST)"
d = datetime.strptime(s, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z %Z')
What am i missing?
%Z is generally used for converting into string format. In any case, it is the offset, not the name of the time zone.
The rest of your code is valid, however:
s = "Mon, 22 Apr 2019 17:04:38 +0200"
d = datetime.strptime(s, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z')
datetime only comes with the ability to parse UTC and whatever local time zone is listed in time.tzname. It can't match (CEST) because it doesn't know what timezone that is (It would also be redundant because you defined the timezone using the offset +0200).
You will need to implement your own (CEST) using datetime.tzinfo or by importing an external library like pytz or pendulum in order to parse (CEST) from a string into a datetime.timezone.
Also, don't forget to include parenthesis() in your match string.
This code passes, however, I do not know what happens to 'CEST' once it is converted into the string.
from datetime import datetime
tz = 'CEST'
s = "Mon, 22 Apr 2019 17:04:38 +0200 " + tz
d = datetime.strptime(s, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z ' + tz)

Python: Date Conversion Error

I'm trying to convert a string into a date format, to be later stored into an SQLite database. Below is the code line at which I'm getting an error.
date_object = datetime.strptime(date, '%b %d, %Y %H:%M %Z')
And this is the error:
File "00Basic.py", line 20, in spider
date_object = datetime.strptime(date, '%b %d, %Y %H:%M %Z') File "C:\Python27\lib\_strptime.py", line 332, in _strptime
(data_string, format)) ValueError: time data 'Aug 19, 2016 08:13 IST' does not match format '%b %d, %Y %H %M %Z'
Question 1: How do I resolve this error?
Question 2: Is this the right approach for preparing to store the date in SQLite later?
Please Note: Very new to programming.
You could use pytz for the timezone conversion as shown:
from datetime import datetime
from pytz import timezone
s = "Aug 19, 2016 08:13 IST".replace('IST', '')
print(timezone('Asia/Calcutta').localize(datetime.strptime(s.rstrip(), '%b %d, %Y %H:%M')))
#2016-08-19 08:13:00+05:30
#<class 'datetime.datetime'>
I would suggest you to use dateutil incase you are handling multiple timezones of string.
The problem is located in the %Z (Time zone) part of the format.
As the documentation explains
%Z Time zone name (empty string if the object is naive). (empty), UTC, EST, CST
It looks like only UTC,EST and CST are valid. (Or it just doesn't recognize IST)
In order to fix this, you could use the %z parameter that accepts any UTC offset, like so:
struct_time = time.strptime("Aug 19, 2016 08:13 +0530", '%b %d, %Y %H:%M %z')
Update: Although this works fine in Python +3.2 it raises an exception when it's run with Python2

Python : Converting string to datetime [duplicate]

I was trying to convert a string to a datetime object.
The string I got from a news feed is in the following format:
"Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT"
I tried using datetime.strptime() to convert it.
i.e.,
datetime.strptime('Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT','%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
And got the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
datetime.strptime('Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT','%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
File "C:\Anaconda\lib_strptime.py", line 325, in _strptime
(data_string, format))
ValueError: time data 'Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT' does not match
format '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z'
However, if I tried the string without "EDT", it worked.
i.e.,
datetime.strptime('Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17','%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')
Does anyone know how to parse that "EDT" part?
To parse the date in RFC 2822 format, you could use email package:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from email.utils import parsedate_tz, mktime_tz
timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz("Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT"))
# -> 1413436577
utc_dt = datetime(1970, 1, 1) + timedelta(seconds=timestamp)
# -> datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 16, 5, 16, 17)
Note: parsedate_tz() assumes that EDT corresponds to -0400 UTC offset but it might be incorrect in Australia where EDT is +1100 (AEDT is used by pytz in this case) i.e., a timezone abbreviation may be ambiguous. See Parsing date/time string with timezone abbreviated name in Python?
Related Python bug: %Z in strptime doesn't match EST and others.
If your computer uses POSIX timestamps (likely), and you are sure the input date is within an acceptable range for your system (not too far into the future/past), and you don't need to preserve the microsecond precision then you could use datetime.utcfromtimestamp:
from datetime import datetime
from email.utils import parsedate_tz, mktime_tz
timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz("Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:16:17 EDT"))
# -> 1413436577
utc_dt = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(timestamp)
# -> datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 16, 5, 16, 17)
The email.utils.parsedate_tz() solution is good for 3-letter timezones but it does not work for 4 letters such as AEDT or CEST. If you need a mix, the answer under Parsing date/time string with timezone abbreviated name in Python? works for both with the most commonly used time zones.

string to date - format string issue

I am need to convert a date in below format into different format for displaying purpose. But before that I am trying to convert the date in string to time object, but not able to do so.
>>> time.strptime("Thu Mar 13 23:15:13 2014 EDT", '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %Z')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/_strptime.py", line 293, in strptime
raise ValueError("time data did not match format: data=%s fmt=%s" %
ValueError: time data did not match format: data=Thu Mar 13 23:15:13 2014 EDT fmt=%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %Z
Did a trial and error and it's the '%Z' causing the issue, below works fine (just %Z is removed)
>>> time.strptime("Thu Mar 13 23:15:13 2014", '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y')
(2014, 3, 13, 23, 15, 13, 3, 72, -1)
Python wiki (https://docs.python.org/2/library/time.html) says timezone specifier is %Z, then what is the issue here. Please help me find.
Python version: 2.4.3
From the Python documentation. https://docs.python.org/2/library/time.html#time.strptime
Support for the %Z directive is based on the values contained in tzname and whether daylight is true. Because of this, it is platform-specific except for recognizing UTC and GMT which are always known (and are considered to be non-daylight savings timezones).
Which basically says that time.strptime() will only recognize timezones that are listed in time.tzname
Hope this helps
%z will only work for numeric timezone in python 3.x, here is a fix for python 2.x:
Instead of using:
datetime.strptime(t,'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M %z')
use the timedelta to account for the timezone, like this:
from datetime import datetime,timedelta
def dt_parse(t):
ret = datetime.strptime(t[0:16],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M')
if t[18]=='+':
ret+=timedelta(hours=int(t[19:22]),minutes=int(t[23:]))
elif t[18]=='-':
ret-=timedelta(hours=int(t[19:22]),minutes=int(t[23:]))
return ret

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