Answer by smci for Converting string into datetime

See my answer.

In real-world data this is a real problem: multiple, mismatched, incomplete, inconsistent and multilanguage/region date formats, often mixed freely in one dataset. It's not ok for production code to fail, let alone go exception-happy like a fox.

We need to try...catch multiple datetime formats fmt1,fmt2,...,fmtn and suppress/handle the exceptions (from strptime()) for all those that mismatch (and in particular, avoid needing a yukky n-deep indented ladder of try..catch clauses). From my solution

def try_strptime(s, fmts=['%d-%b-%y','%m/%d/%Y']):
    for fmt in fmts:
        try:
            return datetime.strptime(s, fmt)
        except:
            continue

    return None # or reraise the ValueError if no format matched, if you prefer