Answer by Mackraken for Converting string into datetime

Create a small utility function like:

def date(datestr="", format="%Y-%m-%d"):
    from datetime import datetime
    if not datestr:
        return datetime.today().date()
    return datetime.strptime(datestr, format).date()

This is versatile enough:

• If you don't pass any arguments it will return today's date.
• There's a date format as default that you can override.
• You can easily modify it to return a datetime.