I have created a script tool that will ask a user to select start and end dates within which records will be selected from a feature class. The field containing the dates is formatted as type Date. I want to use those dates within an sql query to select the records, which requires that they be formatted as dates, but the GetParameterAsText command converts the user selection to a string, which means I have to convert back to date in the code. The code I am using is as follows:
#get start and end dates for report generation
dateFilter1 = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)
dateFilter2 = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(1)
print dateFilter1
print dateFilter2
#convert date inputs from string to date format
dateDateFilter1 = datetime.strptime (dateFilter1, '%m/%d/%Y')
dateDateFilter2 = datetime.strptime (dateFilter2, '%m/%d/%Y')
When I look at the attribute table, the date shows up in the format "30/09/2016" for Sept 30, 2016, for example, which does not match what I have in the code above. However, if I run the script tool and select dates say between Oct 2, 2016 and Oct 5, 2016 ("02/10/2016" and "05/10/2016" in the attribute table), I get the records I expect. However, if I select dates between Sept. 29, 2016 and Oct 5, 2016 ("29/09/2016" and 05/10/2016") I get the following error:
File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\Lib\_strptime.py", line 325, in _strptime
(data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '29/09/2016' does not match format '%m/%d/%Y'
This seems to suggest that the data in the date field is being read as if it was in "%d/%m/%Y" format. If I change the code so that the format for the strptime command shows "%d/%m/%Y" the script runs without error, but returns no records, which also suggests that it is reading the date in the source data as "%d/%m/%Y" (all records are in late September and early October).
Can anyone tell me what might be wrong?
