ruby - Parsing a date that can be in several formats in python

Question

I would like to parse a date that can come in several formats, that I know beforehand. If I could not parse, I return nil. In ruby, I do like this:

DATE_FORMATS = ['%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p', '%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S', '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M', '%m/%d/%Y', '%Y/%m/%d']

def parse_or_nil(date_str)
    parsed_date = nil
    DATE_FORMATS.each do |f|
        parsed_date ||= DateTime.strptime(date_str, f) rescue nil
    end
    parsed_date
end

This is concise and works. How can I do the same thing in Python?

Answer 1

I would just try dateutil. It can recognize most of the formats:

from dateutil import parser
parser.parse(string)

if you end up using datetime.strptime as suggested @RocketDonkey:

from datetime import datetime

def func(s,flist):
    for f in flist:
        try:
            return datetime.strptime(s,f)
        except ValueError:
            pass