My Failed Attempts Before Finally Getting It Right

Alright, let me walk you through this whole deal.

Started simple. Needed a way to pull some basic data out of CSV files.

Just numbers. Just dates. Nothing wild.

Thought Python could handle it easy.

Used the csv library first.

Worked okay at first glance. But then—bam!

Ran into dates formatted weird. Like "20240101" or "Jan 1, 2024".

Parsing became messy.

Dates should be dates, right? Not strings I gotta fight later.

• Tried forcing formats — failed miserably.
• Used * — too rigid.
• Looked for smarter parsers — got complicated fast.

Hours wasted.

The Simple Trick That Saved My Neck

Gave up on smart parsing.

Went stupid simple instead.

Ignored the format completely.

This is what I did:

• Just read the raw date string.
• Stripped spaces.
• Removed commas.
• Kept only numbers and letters.
• Fed it straight into dateutil parser.

Sounds too easy?

It was.

Wrote a tiny function:

clean_string = dirty_*().replace(',', '')

That cleaned up the worst of it.

Then *(clean_string) took care of the rest.

No fancy logic. No guessing formats.

It just worked.

Why I Like This Approach

Real data is messy.

Someone always types dates wrong.

This fix handles 99% of nonsense out there.

Code stays small.

Less stuff breaks.

If a new weird format shows up tomorrow? Probably still works.

Stability beats cleverness.

Sometimes the dumbest solution is the most powerful.

Finished the script around 5am.

Finally.

Ate leftover pizza.

Life felt pretty good.