Python date comparison with string output/format

Question

I'm currently trying to writing a script to automate a function at work, but I'm not intimately familiar with Python. I'm trying to take a XML dump and compare a specific entry's date to see if the time has passed or not.

The date is in a particular format, given:

<3-letter Month> <DD> <HH:MM:SS> <YYYY> <3-letter Timezone>

For example:

May 14 20:11:20 2014 GMT

I've parsed out a string in that raw form, and need to somehow compare it with the current time to find out if the time has passed or not. That said, I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how I should go about either formatting my text, or choosing the right mask/time format in Python.

I've been messing around with different variations of the same basic format:

if(trimmed < time.strftime("%x") ):

Trimmed is the clean date/time string. Time is derived from import time.

Is there a simple way to fix this or will I have to dig into converting the format etc.? I know the above attempt is simplistic, but I'm still very new to Python. Thanks for your time and patience!

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Answer 1

You should use combination of gmtime (for GMT time),mktime and datetime.

from time import gmtime,mktime
from datetime import datetime

s = "May 14 20:11:20 2014 GMT"
f = "%b %d %H:%M:%S %Y GMT"
dt = datetime.strptime(s, f)
gmt = datetime.fromtimestamp(mktime(gmtime()))
if dt<gmt:
    print(dt)
else:
    print(gmt)

Python date comparison with string output/format

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