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pythonpython-dateutil

Error while parsing string to date with dateutil.parser

I am getting an error while trying to parse a string to date.

ValueError: unknown string format

Here is my code

dateString = "02/11/2016"
 print dateString
 dt = parse(dateString)
 item.date = calendar.timegm(dt.utctimetuple())
 print dt

The funny part is, it is printing the correct date before throwing the error. Here is the complete log

02/11/2016 2016-02-11 00:00:00 art. 10, comma 1, lettera e Traceback (most recent call last): File "institutional-docs.py", line 60, in dt = parse(dateString) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/dateutil/parser.py", line 697, in parse return DEFAULTPARSER.parse(timestr, **kwargs) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/dateutil/parser.py", line 303, in parse raise ValueError, "unknown string format" ValueError: unknown string format

Solution

  • What's wrong with using time?

    your question doesn't specify what your parse function does so can't say if that's reading the string in any weird way. Chances are you've copied and pasted bad quotation marks. 

    import time
time.strptime("02/11/2016", "%d/%m/%Y")