Django check if variable contains datetime and format

Question

How do I check if a variable contains a datetime and the format it to just include the date, hour, minutes and seconds. Not milliseconds.

The issue I'm having is that the variable isn't in datetime format as it can either contain text or a date time.

return isinstance(new_value, datetime.datetime)

Therefore running the command above returns false.

If new_value contains 2016-05-24 09:26:51.754000+00:00 how do I format it to look like this : 2016-05-24 09:26:51

Answer 1

At first you need to convert date string to the datetime object, in this way you can check it with 'isinstance()', but I want to suggest better solution, as I think :), because at the Python 2.7, so still popular, we have issue with timezone offset ( %z ) when convert date string to datetime object, so here is my solution without 'strptime' :

from dateutil import parser
date = '2016-05-24 09:26:51.754000+00:00'
try:
    # something if format correct
    parsed_date = parser.parse(date)
    # formatting
    print parsed_date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
except ValueError:
    # something if format incorrect
    print 'Wrong date format'

Sure, please don't forget to write :

$pip install python-dateutil