👀 Views: 1 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-08

regex python datetime Python

I'm performance testing and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm trying to construct a regex pattern in Python to match date strings that may or may not include a time component... My requirement is to match dates in the format `YYYY-MM-DD` and optionally followed by a time in `HH:MM:SS`. For example, both `2023-10-10` and `2023-10-10 14:30:00` should be matched. However, I'm working with issues where my pattern seems to be overly restrictive and fails to match valid inputs. Here's the regex pattern I've been using: ```python import re date_pattern = r'^(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})(\s+(\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}))?$' text1 = '2023-10-10' text2 = '2023-10-10 14:30:00' matches1 = re.match(date_pattern, text1) matches2 = re.match(date_pattern, text2) print(matches1 is not None) # Should be True print(matches2 is not None) # Should be True ``` However, when I run this code, I get `False` for the first test case, even though it should match. I suspect it's an scenario with the optional group, but I need to seem to identify the question. I've also verified that I'm using Python 3.9.1. Can anyone guide to adjust the regex to correctly capture both formats? I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. Is there a better approach? Any examples would be super helpful. For reference, this is a production application. This is for a microservice running on CentOS. Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking?