Generic routine to convert arbitrary formated dates as string into datetime objects.

convert_dt.py

"""
Convert an arbitrary string to a DateTime object
"""
from datetime import datetime

IGNORE_KEY = "no"

DATE_KEYS = (
    "day",
    "month",
    "year",
    "hour",
    "minute",
    "second",
)
DATE_SEP = "-"
TIME_SEP = ":"
SEP = " "


def convert_to_dt(date: str, **args) -> datetime:
    """Converts a date/time string in an arbitrary format to a `datetime`
    object.

    Receive the string as `date`, optionaly, can receive `key` containing
    the desired fields (`DATE_KEYS` by default), `sep` as the separator
    between date and time, `date_sep` as date separator and `time_sep` as
    time separator."""
    sep, keys, date_sep, time_sep = [
        args.get(k, v)
        for k, v in (
            ("sep", SEP),
            ("keys", DATE_KEYS),
            ("dt_sep", DATE_SEP),
            ("tm_sep", TIME_SEP),
        )
    ]

    date_part, time_part = date.split(sep)

    date_dict = {
        k: int(v)
        for k, v in zip(
            keys, date_part.split(date_sep) + time_part.split(time_sep)
        )
        if not k == IGNORE_KEY
    }

    return datetime(**date_dict)


if __name__ == "__main__":

    # date in DD/MM/AAAA HH:MM:SS format
    SAMPLE_1 = "01/05/1973 11:15:00"
    print(convert_to_dt(SAMPLE_1, dt_sep="/"))

    # date in YYYY-MM-DD,HH:MM:SS format (ignoring last two fields)
    SAMPLE_2 = "2019-04-30,12:34:56"
    print(
        convert_to_dt(
            SAMPLE_2,
            keys=("year", "month", "day", "hour", IGNORE_KEY, IGNORE_KEY),
            sep=",",
            dt_sep="-",
        )
    )