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Exercise

Converting date formats - simple

Sales area A in Europe and Sales area B in Australia have different date formats.

  • Sale A: 4000 on 14/02/2018
  • Sale B: 3000 on 2 March 2018

If we want to consolidate or compare sales periods, we need to convert to the same date format. We can easily do this by using the datetime library and the datetime.strptime(date_string, format) method, using the following directives:

Directive Meaning Example
%d Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number 01, 02, …, 31
%b Month as locale’s abbreviated name Jan, Feb, …, Dec
%B Month as locale’s full name January, …, December
%m Month as a zero-padded decimal number 01, 02, …, 12
%y Year without century as a zero-padded decimal number 00, 01, …, 99
%Y Year with century as a decimal number 1970, 1988, 2001, 2013

Instructions

100 XP
  • Import the datetime library.
  • Create a dt_object that converts the dates of each sale into a standardized format of day-month-year.
  • Print each result to compare