Faster Way To Handle Time String With Python

I have many log files with the format like: 2012-09-12 23:12:00 other logs here and i need to extract the time string and compare the time delta between two log records. I did tha

Solution 1:

You could get rid of the regex and use map:

date_time = datetime.datetime

for line in log:
    date, time = line.strip().split(' ', 2)[:2]

    timelist = map(int, date.split('-') + time.split(':'))
    d = date_time(*timelist)

• I think.split(' ', 2) will be faster than just .split() because it only splits up to two times and only on spaces, not on any whitespace.
• map(int, l) is faster than [int(x) for x in l] the last time I checked.
• If you can, get rid of .strip().

Solution 2:

You could do it entirely with regular expressions, which might be faster.

find_time = re.compile("^(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) (\d{2}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})")

for line in log:
    timelist = find_time.match(line)
    if timelist:
        d = datetime.datetime(*map(int, timelist.groups()))

Solution 3:

You can also try without regexp, using the optional argument of split

(date, time, log) = line.split(" ", 2)
timerecord = datetime.datetime.strptime(date+" "+time, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

and then it'd be a matter of computing your timedeltas between consecutive timerecords