Parse date string and change format

datetime module could help you with that:

datetime.datetime.strptime(date_string, format1).strftime(format2)

For the specific example you could do

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Mon Feb 15 2010', '%a %b %d %Y').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')
'15/02/2010'
>>>

>>> from_date="Mon Feb 15 2010"
>>> import time                
>>> conv=time.strptime(from_date,"%a %b %d %Y")
>>> time.strftime("%d/%m/%Y",conv)
'15/02/2010'

As this question comes often, here is the simple explanation.

datetime or time module has two important functions.

• strftime - creates a string representation of date or time from a datetime or time object.
• strptime - creates a datetime or time object from a string.

In both cases, we need a formating string. It is the representation that tells how the date or time is formatted in your string.

Now lets assume we have a date object.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> d = datetime(2010, 2, 15)
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 15, 0, 0)

If we want to create a string from this date in the format 'Mon Feb 15 2010'

>>> s = d.strftime('%a %b %d %y')
>>> print s
Mon Feb 15 10

Lets assume we want to convert this s again to a datetime object.

>>> new_date = datetime.strptime(s, '%a %b %d %y')
>>> print new_date
2010-02-15 00:00:00

Refer This document all formatting directives regarding datetime.

@codeling and @user1767754 : The following two lines will work. I saw no one posted the complete solution for the example problem that was asked. Hopefully this is enough explanation.

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime.strptime("Mon Feb 15 2010", "%a %b %d %Y").strftime("%d/%m/%Y")
print(x)

Output:

15/02/2010

You may achieve this using pandas as well:

import pandas as pd

pd.to_datetime('Mon Feb 15 2010', format='%a %b %d %Y').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')

Output:

'15/02/2010'

You may apply pandas approach for different datatypes as:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

def reformat_date(date_string, old_format, new_format):
    return pd.to_datetime(date_string, format=old_format, errors='ignore').strftime(new_format)

date_string = 'Mon Feb 15 2010'
date_list = ['Mon Feb 15 2010', 'Wed Feb 17 2010']
date_array = np.array(date_list)
date_series = pd.Series(date_list)

old_format = '%a %b %d %Y'
new_format = '%d/%m/%Y'

print(reformat_date(date_string, old_format, new_format))
print(reformat_date(date_list, old_format, new_format).values)
print(reformat_date(date_array, old_format, new_format).values)
print(date_series.apply(lambda x: reformat_date(x, old_format, new_format)).values)

Output:

15/02/2010
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']
['15/02/2010' '17/02/2010']

use datetime library http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html look up 9.1.7. especiall strptime() strftime() Behavior¶ examples http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/datesandtimes.html