I use dateutil.parse() to parse out datetime strings from a file. Once in a while these strings are not actual date times. All kinds of things can be there.

My trouble is that parse() gives me false positives when I do not want it to parse. For example: dateutil.parse("99") turns into a datetime with today's date and with the year 1999.

How could I make it to raise an exception if parse() is not passed a string with year, day, and month (in various formats)?