formating_dates.py

#Reformating date strings 

#Crawled and first discovered dates from the Search Console API: webmasters.urlcrawlerrorssamples.list 

last_crawled= "2019-01-12T04:00:59.000Z" #ISO-8601 date
first_detected= "2018-11-19T02:59:25.000Z"

from datetime import datetime
#Here is how to parse dates the hard way. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior

dt = datetime.strptime(last_crawled, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ') #you need to create a precise date format string
print(dt)

#output -> datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 12, 4, 0, 59)

#Here is how to do this the easy way using https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

import dateutil.parser
dt = dateutil.parser.parse(last_crawled)
print(dt)

#output -> datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 12, 4, 0, 59, tzinfo=tzlocal())

#Google Analytics API ga:date
ga_date= "20190311"

dt = dateutil.parser.parse(ga_date)

print(dt)

#output -> datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 11, 0, 0)

#Latest links crawled date
Last_crawled= "Mar 4, 2019"

dt = dateutil.parser.parse(Last_crawled)
print(dt)

#output -> datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 4, 0, 0)

#finally we can format any these datetime objects using a consistent format

print(dt.isoformat())

#output -> '2019-01-12T04:00:59+00:00'