How to do date validation in Python?

The date validation you want to achieve in python will largely depend on the format of the date you have. The strptime function from the datetime library can be used to parse strings to dates/times.

Example

import datetime
date_string = '2017-12-31'
date_format = '%Y-%m-%d'
try:
  date_obj = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_string, date_format)
  print(date_obj)
except ValueError:
  print("Incorrect data format, should be YYYY-MM-DD")

Output

This will give the output −

2017-12-31 00:00:00

You can use many other directives to parse the date. Following are the directives supported by strptime()'s format string.