I am pretty sure that there is a function for this, but I been searching for a while, so decided to simply ask SO instead.

I am writing a Python script that parses and analyzes text messages from an input file. Each line looks like this:

Oct 24, 2014, 19:20 - Lee White: Hello world!

or:

Apr 4, 19:20 - Lee White: Hello world!

If the year in the datetime is not mentioned, it means that the message was sent in the current year.

What I want to do, is parse this string into multiple variables. Ideally, I am looking for a function that takes an input string, a format string, and a couple of variables to store the output in:

foo(input, "MMM DD, YYYY, HH:MM - Sender: Text", &mon, &day, &year, &hour, &minutes, &sender, &text)

Does such a thing exist in Python?

This uses the remarkably useful dateutil library to make date parsing easier - you can pip install python-dateutil or easy_install python-dateutil it. Split the data on the : and the - to get message and sender, then process the date text to get a datetime object where you can access its various attributes to get the components required, eg:

from dateutil.parser import parses = 'Apr 4, 19:20 - Lee White: Hello world!'
fst, _, msg = s.rpartition(': ')
date, _, name = fst.partition(' - ')
date = parse(date)
name, msg, date.year, date.month, date.day, date.hour, date.minute
# ('Lee White', 'Hello world!', 2015, 4, 4, 19, 20)