166 – strftime vs strptime

The methods strftime and strptime can be used to convert dates/times into strings and vice-versa. Here’s a mnemonic to help you remember which is which:

• strptime has a “P” for “Parse date/time”, so it’ll accept a string and parse a date/time from it:

import datetime as dt

date = dt.date.strptime("2025-11-04", "%Y-%m-%d")
print(date)  # datetime.date(2025, 11, 4)

• strftime has an “F” for “Format date/time”, so it’ll accept a date/time and it will format it as a string:

print(date).strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
# 2025-11-04