datetime – Python strptime() and timezones?

datetime – Python strptime() and timezones?

I recommend using python-dateutil. Its parser has been able to parse every date format Ive thrown at it so far.

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse(Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010)
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 22, 7, 46, 22, tzinfo=tzlocal())
>>> parser.parse(Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:18:09 -0400)
datetime.datetime(2011, 11, 11, 3, 18, 9, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))
>>> parser.parse(Sun)
datetime.datetime(2011, 12, 18, 0, 0)
>>> parser.parse(10-11-08)
datetime.datetime(2008, 10, 11, 0, 0)

and so on. No dealing with strptime() format nonsense… just throw a date at it and it Does The Right Thing.

Update: Oops. I missed in your original question that you mentioned that you used dateutil, sorry about that. But I hope this answer is still useful to other people who stumble across this question when they have date parsing questions and see the utility of that module.

The datetime module documentation says:

Return a datetime corresponding to date_string, parsed according to format. This is equivalent to datetime(*(time.strptime(date_string, format)[0:6])).

See that [0:6]? That gets you (year, month, day, hour, minute, second). Nothing else. No mention of timezones.

Interestingly, [Win XP SP2, Python 2.6, 2.7] passing your example to time.strptime doesnt work but if you strip off the %Z and the EST it does work. Also using UTC or GMT instead of EST works. PST and MEZ dont work. Puzzling.

Its worth noting this has been updated as of version 3.2 and the same documentation now also states the following:

When the %z directive is provided to the strptime() method, an aware datetime object will be produced. The tzinfo of the result will be set to a timezone instance.

Note that this doesnt work with %Z, so the case is important. See the following example:

In [1]: from datetime import datetime

In [2]: start_time = datetime.strptime(2018-04-18-17-04-30-AEST,%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S-%Z)

In [3]: print(TZ NAME: {tz}.format(tz=start_time.tzname()))
TZ NAME: None

In [4]: start_time = datetime.strptime(2018-04-18-17-04-30-+1000,%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S-%z)

In [5]: print(TZ NAME: {tz}.format(tz=start_time.tzname()))
TZ NAME: UTC+10:00

datetime – Python strptime() and timezones?

Since strptime returns a datetime object which has tzinfo attribute, We can simply replace it with desired timezone.

>>> import datetime

>>> date_time_str = 2018-06-29 08:15:27.243860
>>> date_time_obj = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_time_str, %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f).replace(tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)
>>> date_time_obj.tzname()
UTC