How do I parse an HTTP date-string in Python?

Question

Is there an easy way to parse HTTP date-strings in Python? According to the standard, there are several ways to format HTTP date strings; the method should be able to handle this.

In other words, I want to convert a string like "Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:15:29 GMT" to a python time-structure.

Answer 1

>>> import email.utils as eut >>> eut.parsedate('Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:15:29 GMT') (2009, 9, 23, 22, 15, 29, 0, 1, -1) 

If you want a datetime.datetime object, you can do:

def my_parsedate(text):     return datetime.datetime(*eut.parsedate(text)[:6]) 

Answer 2

Since Python 3.3 there's email.utils.parsedate_to_datetime which can parse RFC 5322 timestamps (aka IMF-fixdate, Internet Message Format fixed length format, a subset of HTTP-date of RFC 7231).

>>> from email.utils import parsedate_to_datetime ...  ... s = 'Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT' ... parsedate_to_datetime(s) 0: datetime.datetime(1994, 11, 6, 8, 49, 37, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc) 

There's also undocumented http.cookiejar.http2time which can achieve the same as follows:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timezone ... from http.cookiejar import http2time ...  ... s = 'Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT' ... datetime.utcfromtimestamp(http2time(s)).replace(tzinfo=timezone.utc) 1: datetime.datetime(1994, 11, 6, 8, 49, 37, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc) 

It was introduced in Python 2.4 as cookielib.http2time for dealing with Cookie Expires directive which is expressed in the same format.