Converting utc time string to datetime object

Question

I'm using the Paypal API and I get back a timestamp in the following format. I try to parse this to a datetime object using strptime, but I get the following error:

(Pdb) datetime.strptime('2012-03-01T10:00:00Z','%Y-%M-%dT%H:%M:%SZ') *** error: redefinition of group name 'M' as group 5; was group 2 

Also, as this format is supposed to be quite a standard format isn't there a function available for this?

EDIT:

Ok seems to be a typo. First %M should be %m

Answer 1

The parser from dateutil is your friend.

You'll have to pip install dateutil but you've save bags and bags of date conversion code:

pip install python-dateutil 

You can use it like this.

from dateutil import parser ds = '2012-03-01T10:00:00Z' # or any date sting of differing formats. date = parser.parse(ds) 

You'll find you can deal with almost any date string formats with this parser and you'll get a nice standard python date back