I have a Dataframe in python, with the data coming from a csv. In the column "Date" I have a date (:)) but I don't know the date format. How can I detect it?

e.g.: I can have 05/05/2022. this can be M/D/Y or D/M/Y. I can manually understand it by looking at other entries, but I wish I can do it automatically.

Is there a way to do so? thank you

datetime.strptime requires you to know the format. trying (try - exept)-commands isn't good since there are so many different format I can receive.

it would be nice to have something that recognizes the format...

CodePudding user response：

You can try the dateutil library. To deal with dates and also with the diversity of timezones people often use external libraries such as pytz or dateutil.

dateutil has a very powerful parser.

from dateutil.parser import parse

parse('05/05/2022')  # datetime.datetime(2022, 5, 5, 0, 0)
parse('2022-05-05')  # datetime.datetime(2022, 5, 5, 0, 0)

CodePudding user response：

Use the isinstance built-in function to check if a variable is a datetime object in Python, e.g. if isinstance(today, datetime): . The isinstance function returns True if the passed in object is an instance or a subclass of the passed in class. Copied!20-Apr-2022

check out here

https://www.folkstalk.com/2022/10/python-check-if-string-is-date-format-with-code-examples.html