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pythonmatlabdatetime-format

How to convert the integer date format into YYYYMMDD?


Python and Matlab quite often have integer date representations as follows:

733828.0
733829.0
733832.0
733833.0
733834.0
733835.0
733836.0
733839.0
733840.0
733841.0

These numbers correspond to some dates this year. Do you know which function can convert them back to YYYYMMDD format?


Solution

  • The datetime.datetime class can help you here. The following works, if those values are treated as integer days (you don't specify what they are).

    >>> from datetime import datetime
    >>> dt = datetime.fromordinal(733828)
    >>> dt
    datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 25, 0, 0)
    >>> dt.strftime('%Y%m%d')
    '20100225'
    

    You show the values as floats, and the above doesn't take floats. If you can give more detail about what the data is (and where it comes from) it will be possible to give a more complete answer.