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Message: [QUOTE="CM, post: 4094182"] I'm looking for a good way to check whether a certain string is valid. It is a string representation of a Python timedelta object, like this: '0:00:03.695000' (But the first place, the hours, could also be double digits) In trying to figure out how to validate that, I saw this page which creates a parseTimeDelta(s) function, which takes that kind of string and returns a timedelta object: [URL]http://kbyanc.blogspot.com/2007/08/python-reconstructing-timedeltas-from.html[/URL] (and I agree that this sort of function should come standard with datetime) I modified the code to accept microseconds, too, and I can use it now by trying to parse my candidate string and if it throws an exception, rejecting that string as invalid. It works fine on strings that are not even close to my format, like '0 min'. But it doesn't throw an exception on something like: '0:00:03.695000extrajunk' I'd like it to be pickier than that with the validation and only accept strings which are truly string representations of timedelta objects. But I have not learned regex yet, so am not sure how to modify parseTimeDetla so it wouldn't work with '0:00:03.695000extrajunk'. My question: is there a simple way to modify the parseTimeDelta so that it will work ONLY with a string that would be the string representation of a timedelta object? Alternately, is there an easier/more Pythonic approach to validate this kind of string? Thanks for any suggestions. Che [/QUOTE]