You could use a couple of regular expressions:
import re
txt = 'ID674021384 25/01/1986 heloo hi thanks 5 minutes and 25-01-1988.'
retime = re.compile('([0-9]+) *minutes')
redate = re.compile('([0-9]+[/-][0-9]+[/-][0-9]{4})')
# find all dates in 'txt'
dates = redate.findall(txt)
print dates
# find all times in 'txt'
times = retime.findall(txt)
print times
# replace dates and times in orignal string:
newtxt = txt
for adate in dates:
newtxt = newtxt.replace(adate, 'date')
for atime in times:
newtxt = newtxt.replace(atime, 'time')
The output looks like this:
Original string:
ID674021384 25/01/1986 heloo hi thanks 5 minutes and 25-01-1988.
Found dates:['25/01/1986', '25-01-1988']
Found times: ['5']
New string:
ID674021384 date heloo hi thanks time minutes and date.
Dates and times found:
ID674021384 DATE:2 TIME:1
Chris