Convert String into DateTime in Python

In order to convert a string into datetime you will need to import the DateTime module.

from datetime import datetime

Next, let's create a string variable that contains the date in any valid date format.

str_date = "2023-03-07 01:30:00"

Next, we need to create a format string for the DateTime format that we are dealing with here, the following table is really handy for decoding the date format into the respective format string. I will highly recommend you bookmark this page.

Date/Time format string	Description	Example
%Y	4-digit year	2023
%m	2-digit month	03
%d	2-digit day	07
%H	24-hour hour	01
%M	minute	30
%S	second	00
%f	microsecond	000000
%j	day of the year	066
%U	week number of the year (Sunday as the 1st day of the week)	09
%W	week number of the year (Monday as the 1st day of the week)	10
%a	Abbreviated Weekday Name	Tue
%A	Full Weekday Name	Friday
%b	Abbreviated Month Name	Mar
%B	Full Month Name	March
%c	local date and time representation	Mon Mar 7 01:30:00 2023
%p	AM or PM	PM
%x	Local Date Representation	03/07/23
%X	Local Time Representation	01:30:00

Read More: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-format-codes

So, our date time format string is as below based on the table,

date_format_str = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

We will make use of the method strptime() from datetime module to get the DateTime object.

Syntax:

datetime.strptime(str_date, date_format_str)

Complete Python Code Example:

'''
 Converting Python String 
 into DateTime Object
 By: Code2care.org
'''
from datetime import datetime

str_date = "2023-03-07 01:30:00"
date_format_str = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

datetime_object = datetime.strptime(str_date, date_format_str)

print(datetime_object)

Output:

2023-03-07 01:30:00

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