python datetime strptime wildcard

datetime, parsing, python, strptime

Solution

Try using the dateutil.parser module.

import dateutil.parser
date1 = dateutil.parser.parse("December 12th, 2008")
date2 = dateutil.parser.parse("January 1st, 2009")

Additional documentation can be found here: http://labix.org/python-dateutil

Problem

I want to parse dates like these into a datetime object: - December 12th, 2008 - January 1st, 2009 The following will work for the first date: ``` datetime.strptime("December 12th, 2008", "%B %dth, %Y") ``` but will fail for the second because of the suffix to the day number ('st'). So, is there an undocumented wildcard character in strptime? Or a better approach altogether?

Original source