Given a date I need to separate data into weeks

[cspower]

Thank You larz60 I will try your solution
In the mean time can someone explain to me why this might be happening?
First why does

values.strip()

not take off the /n but

cleanedData.append(datetime.strptime(re.sub(',+|\\r|\\n|','', values), '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M'))

does?

Second why is the date 4/4/2017 12:57 in the proper format for the line

cleanedData.append(datetime.strptime(re.sub(',+|\\r|\\n|','', values), '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M'))

but '10/20/2016 11:28' is not?

As you can see from the output I have been able to separate the header 'created' from the dates that follows by adding the \n to the word in the if compare statement. When I tried to strip off the \n and do the compare it did not work, why?

What is different about the dates 4/4/2017 12:57 and 10/20/2016 11:28 that allows the format.strptime to process the first one but complain that the second one is not in the corrrect format?

Output:
Before the if else block created

in the if statement created

Before the if else block 4/4/2017 12:57

in the else statement 4/4/2017 12:57

Added to dictionary key [' c r e a t e d ', datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 4, 12, 57)]
Before the if else block 10/20/2016 11:28

in the else statement 10/20/2016 11:28

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "date_filter_error_report.py", line 211, in <module>
    parsedData = cleanTheData(parsedData)
  File "date_filter_error_report.py", line 113, in cleanTheData
    cleanedData.append(datetime.strptime(re.sub(',+|\\r|\\n|','', values), '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M'))
  File "C:\Python36\lib\_strptime.py", line 565, in _strptime_datetime
    tt, fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
  File "C:\Python36\lib\_strptime.py", line 362, in _strptime
    (data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '10/20/2016 11:28' does not match format '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M'

def cleanTheData(ds):

    # removes excess characters from sys_created_on values
    cleanedData = list() # clears list
    for values in ds['sys_created_on']:
        print('Before the if else block', values)
        if values=='created\n':
            cleanedData.append(re.sub(',+|\\r|\\n|', ' ', values))
            print('in the if statement', values)
        else:
            print('in the else statement', values)
            cleanedData.append(datetime.strptime(re.sub(',+|\\r|\\n|','', values), '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M'))
            ds['sys_created_on'] = cleanedData
            print('Added to dictionary key', ds['sys_created_on'])

    return ds