date_to 1.2.1

One friendly python function for parsing and converting to and between datetime.datetime, int, and string objects

date_to - The easy date converter

Convert any date to another with just one friendly function

date_to() will convert your dates between datetime objects, unix timestamps, and strings. No more boilerplate and headaches of trying to keep track of your dates and their (lack) of timezones.

date_to() utilises the dateparser library for string parsing, enabling many kinds of string representations of time to be converted into machine interpretable dates. All output dates are rounded to second precision.

Default timezone conversion is to UTC. If you wish to convert your date to another timezone, simply provide the abbreviation of your desired timezone for the optional timezone= keyword argument.

Installation

The date_to library is available on PyPi and easily installed using pip:

pip install date_to

Basic Use

from date_to import date_to

some_date = "2001-09-11 17:20 EDT"

a = date_to(some_date)
b = date_to(some_date, "date")
c = date_to(some_date, str, timezone="JST")
d = date_to(some_date, to_type=int)

print(a, type(a))
print(b, type(b))
print(c, type(c))
print(d, type(d))

Output:

2001-09-11 21:20:00+00:00 <class 'datetime.datetime'>
2001-09-11 21:20:00+00:00 <class 'datetime.datetime'>
2001-09-12T06:20:00+09:00 <class 'str'>
1000243200 <class 'int'>

Accepted to_type Inputs

import datetime as dt

accepted_object_inputs = str | int | float | dt.datetime | dt.date
accepted_string_inputs = {
    "str": ["str", "string", "text", ],
    "int": ["int", "timestamp", "epoch", "unix", "float", ],
    "date": ["datetime.datetime", "datetime", "date", "dt", "dt.datetime", "dt.date", ],
}

Parse Settings

If you wish to change the string parse conversion behaviour you can add a dict of keyword arguments to the function's parser_settings= optional keyword argument. Please refer to the dateparser documentation for possible settings.

DEFAULT_SETTINGS = {
    "TIMEZONE": "UTC",
    "PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH": "first",
    "RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE": True,
}