Change date format of these string using Python

I have a string from a pdf that I want to transform it to the date format that I want to work with later,

the string is 05Dec22

how can I change it to 12/05/2022?

import datetime


date1 = '05Dec22'
date1 = datetime.datetime.strptime(date1, '%d%m%Y').strftime('%m/%d/%y')
date1 = str(date1)

This is what i tried so far

Answer

If you execute the code you’ll get the following error,

ValueError: time data '05Dec22' does not match format '%d%m%Y'

this is because your time string is not in the specified format given (‘%d%m%Y’). You can search for tables on the internet which show the placeholders that represent a certain formatting, if you look at the one provided here, you’ll see that the formatting your string has is ‘%d%b%y’, in this case, the %b placeholder represents the abbreviated month name and the %y placeholder is the year without century, just as your example string. Now, if you fix that in your code,

import datetime


date1 = '05Dec22'
date1 = datetime.datetime.strptime(date1, '%d%b%y').strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
date1 = str(date1)

you’ll get the desired result. Note that you also have to change the output format in strftime. As I said before, the %y placeholder is the year without century. For you to get the year including the century, you have to use %Y.