Python strptime ValueError it seem as time data is empty

Question

I'm sure I am missing something quite trivial here so I have the below code

 date1 =  re.findall('0000(.*)', date1.encode('utf-8'))

 str1 = '-'.join(date1)
 print str1
 print type(str1)
 dt = datetime.strptime(str1,"%B %d, %Y ")

and I get an error of

 ValueError: time data '' does not match format '%B %d, %Y '

it seems as if str1 is empty so I checked it with

print str1
print type(str1)

and get the following results

October 24, 2014
<type 'str'>

I cant work out why it thinks str1 is empty any ideas?

Appended full code

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import wikipedia
import re
from datetime import datetime


acq = wikipedia.page('List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google')

test = acq.html()

#print test

##html = acq.html()

soup = BeautifulSoup(test)

table = soup.find('table', {'class' : 'wikitable sortable'})

company = ""
date1 = ""



for row in table.findAll('tr'):
    cells = row.findAll('td')
    if len(cells) == 8:
        date1 = cells[1].get_text()
        company = cells[2].get_text()



    ##print date
    date1 =  re.findall('0000(.*)', date1)

    str1 = ''.join(date1)
    print str1
    print type(str1)
    dt = datetime.strptime(str1,"%B %d, %Y ")