import sys, os, re, datetime # Patterns for Regex and STRPTIME function timepattern = r"\[(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}:\d{2})\](.+)" strptimepattern = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" def getDateTime(string): return datetime.datetime.strptime(re.match(timepattern, string).group(1), strptimepattern) def process(): newpath = os.path.join(sys.path[0], '..', 'processed_input') path = os.path.join(sys.path[0], '..', 'input') data = open(path, 'r').read().split('\n') return sorted(data, key=getDateTime)