Pythonic way to make datetime object

Question

Curently I am using this:

from datetime import datetime
startDate = datetime.strptime('03.12.2004', '%d.%m.%Y')

Is there some simpler/Pythonic way ?

Answer 1

You can use the following to initialize a datetime object instead of using the string above:

datetime.datetime(2004, 12, 3)

Answer 2

Not that shorter is better, but I find it easier to read if you're going to have a lot of lines creating datetimes, of course assuming 'dt' doesn't clash with anything else in your code.

from datetime import datetime as dt

start = dt(2004, 12, 3)