Getting dates from an attribute table

Question

I'm using the following to get a list of dates in a field called "EFF_DATE" from an attribute table for some pre-selected features.

selectDates = [row[0] for row in arcpy.da.SearchCursor(selects, "EFF_DATE")]

I then use max() to get the most current date from that list:

selectDates = max(selectDates)

This is my result for In[]:selectDates

datetime.datetime(2012, 12, 18, 0, 0)

If I run In[]:print(selectDates), I get

2012年12月18日 00:00:00 That looks better but what I want is just this '12/18/2012' How do I convert it?

Answer 1

While the original poster's provided solution of individually selecting the day month and year and constructing a string from it is a valid method of accomplishing the goal, the significantly shorter and easier method (in my opinion), is to use the datetime module's strftime() method (https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior).

so it may look something like:

import datetime
... <your code here> ...
eff_date = selectDates.strftime('%m/%d%Y')
... <continue your code>...

And using the various formatting options described above, you could make a date/time string look however you wanted it to read. Ex: with .strftime('%A, %B %d, %Y') you could have it output in the format 'Wednesday, September 12, 2018'

Answer 2

OK, I was able to resolve this after a little research. Basically, datetime.datetime formats results by day, month, year, seconds, minutes, hour, etc... All I have to do was pull out the str(value) I wanted and add a "/". The result was something like this:

eff_date = str(selectDates.month) + "/" + str(selectDates.day) + "/" + str(selectDates.year)

This resulted in: eff_date = '12/18/2018'