Parsing different date formats from feedparser in python?

Question

I'm trying to get the dates from entries in two different RSS feeds through feedparser.

Here is what I'm doing:

import feedparser as fp
reddit = fp.parse("http://www.reddit.com/.rss")
cc = fp.parse("http://contentconsumer.com/feed")
print reddit.entries[0].date
print cc.entries[0].date

And here's how they come out:

2008-10-21T22:23:28.033841+00:00

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:06:10 +0000

I want to get to the point where I can find out which is newer easily.

I've tried using the datetime module of Python and searching through the feedparser documentation, but I can't get past this problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

Helyn

Answer 1

Parsing of dates is a pain with RSS feeds in-the-wild, and that's where feedparser can be a big help.

If you use the *_parsed properties (like updated_parsed), feedparser will have done the work and will return a 9-tuple Python date in UTC.

See http://packages.python.org/feedparser/date-parsing.html for more gory details.

Benton