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Python Dates and Times in Python (2014) Dates and Times strftime & strptime

strftime and strptime

This is for challenge part 2. I cant seem to solve it

timestrings.py
## Examples
# to_string(datetime_object) => "24 September 2012"
# from_string("09/24/12 18:30", "%m/%d/%y %H:%M") => datetime

def to_string(datetime_object):
    return datetime_object.strftime('%d %B %Y')

def from_string('September 29 2017'):
    return datetime.strptime(from_string, "%B %d %Y")

5 Answers

Josh Keenan
Josh Keenan
20,315 Points

Almost!

return datetime.datetime.strptime(my_date, my_format)

You need to take some date, and some format, and then convert that date to that format. Hope this helps, feel free to ask any other questions.

Josh Keenan
Josh Keenan
20,315 Points

You have gone about the second one wrong. You want to be passing in two parameters to it, not just a raw string.

You will be receiving two things, a date, and a format for the date; you then need to put the date you have into that format. Remember that this isn't an instance method, meaning that you shouldn't be calling mydate.method() of any kind. Hope this helps!

def from_string(my_date, my_format):
Josh Keenan
Josh Keenan
20,315 Points

No, you need to use the parameters and not anything else, the last solution I posted works.

I'll explain it all.

def from_string(my_date, my_format):
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(my_date, my_format)

The function has two parameters, the first is going to be a date, the second will be a format. You can't use a string like you did, because then you are setting it up to use just that format giving users no control. So when the function is called it would look like this:

from_string("09/24/12 18:30", "%m/%d/%y %H:%M") 

The date and format could be different every time so we need to make sure we are ready for whatever the user throws at it.

so do you mean like this

def from_string(date, "%B %d %Y")
    return strptime(from_string)

Is this correct?

So something like:

def from_string(date, strptime):
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(date, "%B %d %Y")