title: How do I strtotime in python?
body: <p>I'm scraping a a page that includes among other things, date information. So I have a variable named <code>warrant_issued</code> that contains <code>u'11/5/2003'</code> -- I want to store this as a machine readable date. PHP has a handy <code>strtotime</code> function that works fabulously. I was hoping that <a href="http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior">datetime</a>'s <a href="http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior">strptime</a> would help me but it doesn't seem to be available in my version of <code>datetime</code> -- here is everything in my tab complete on <code>datetime.</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>In [231]: datetime.
  datetime.MAXYEAR           datetime.__hash__          datetime.__sizeof__
  datetime.MINYEAR           datetime.__init__          datetime.__str__
  datetime.__class__         datetime.__name__          datetime.__subclasshook__
  datetime.__delattr__       datetime.__new__           datetime.date
  datetime.__dict__          datetime.__package__       datetime.datetime
  datetime.__doc__           datetime.__reduce__        datetime.datetime_CAPI
  datetime.__file__          datetime.__reduce_ex__     datetime.time
  datetime.__format__        datetime.__repr__          datetime.timedelta
  datetime.__getattribute__  datetime.__setattr__       datetime.tzinfo
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm using iPython 2.7.2+ </p>
  
  <p>Am I barking up the wrong tree here? What's the best way to turn <code>u'11/5/2003'</code> into a date? </p>