[Python] Converting strings in an array to dates

I have read an array of strings from a TXT file and saved it as an array (of over thousand values) using such a line:

dates = np.genfromtxt('filename.txt', delimiter=";", usecols=(0), dtype=None)


Next, I would like to convert strings into dates. I tried to use the line:

dates2 = dt.datetime.strptime([dates], '"%Y-%m-%d"').date()


however, I got an error:

TypeError: must be string, not list
​

I figured out that such a code works fine:

data1='"2010-02-28"'
data1_1 = dt.datetime.strptime(data1, '"%Y-%m-%d"').date()


How should I deal with the described problem?

Continue reading...