How to create datetime object from a unicode string?

Question

I am haviing trouble converting in python from this format:

u'08:00:00'

to a datetime object like:

datetime.datetime(2017,02,22,8,0,0)

What is an easy way to do this?

I can do it by just parsing the string but looking for more elegant solution

Possible duplicate of [Converting string into datetime](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/466345/converting-string-into-datetime) — Neo X, Feb 24 '17 at 00:57

mhawke · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-24T01:26:35.997

First you need to parse the time string. You can do that by hand, or use datetime.strptime():

from datetime import datetime

s = u'08:00:00'
t = datetime.strptime(s, '%H:%M:%S').time()

strptime() doesn't care that you give it a unicode string. That will give you a datetime.time object:

>>> t
datetime.time(8, 0)

Then use datetime.combine() to combine the time with today's date:

from datetime import date

dt = datetime.combine(date.today(), t)

This will give you the required datetime.datetime object:

>>> dt
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 24, 8, 0)

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