Manipulating a Date in a String

For example, suppose that the date "September 4, 1999" is stored as "19990423", and you want to convert this date to "23-APR-1999". The following code example defines a function that performs this type of date translation:

import time

def convert_date(date):
	# We use string manipulation to extract the parts
	# of the date and convert them into integers
	year = int(date[0:4])
	month = int(date[4:6])
	day = int(date[6:8])

	# Use the year, month and day to construct a date
	# sequence. The other six elements, which are not
	# used in this date, are hour, minute, second,
	# day of week, day of year, and daylight saving.
	temp_date = (year, month, day, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

	# Now we format as string using strftime
	date = time.strftime("%d-%b-%Y",temp_date)

	# Finally we convert to uppercase, since the output of strftime
	# is 23-Apr-1999
	date = date.upper()
	# return the converted date
	return date

And the following code uses this function to perform the conversion in a segment level or table level script:

# value is originally "19990423"
value = convert_date(value)
# value is now "23-APR-1999"


	For more information, see the description of the time module on the Python web site.

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Manipulating a Date in a String