How to parse dates with -0400 timezone string in Python?

Question

I have a date string of the form '2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400'. It seems that previous versions of Python may have supported a %z format tag in strptime for the trailing timezone specification, but 2.6.x seems to have removed that.

What's the right way to parse this string into a datetime object?

Answer 1

You can use the parse function from dateutil:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse >>> d = parse('2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400') >>> d datetime.datetime(2009, 5, 13, 19, 19, 30, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400)) 

This way you obtain a datetime object you can then use.

As answered, dateutil2.0 is written for Python 3.0 and does not work with Python 2.x. For Python 2.x dateutil1.5 needs to be used.

Answer 2

%z is supported in Python 3.2+:

>>> from datetime import datetime >>> datetime.strptime('2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400', '%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S %z') datetime.datetime(2009, 5, 13, 19, 19, 30,                   tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(-1, 72000))) 

On earlier versions:

from datetime import datetime  date_str = '2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400' naive_date_str, _, offset_str = date_str.rpartition(' ') naive_dt = datetime.strptime(naive_date_str, '%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S') offset = int(offset_str[-4:-2])*60 + int(offset_str[-2:]) if offset_str[0] == "-":    offset = -offset dt = naive_dt.replace(tzinfo=FixedOffset(offset)) print(repr(dt)) # -> datetime.datetime(2009, 5, 13, 19, 19, 30, tzinfo=FixedOffset(-240)) print(dt) # -> 2009-05-13 19:19:30-04:00 

where FixedOffset is a class based on the code example from the docs:

from datetime import timedelta, tzinfo  class FixedOffset(tzinfo):     """Fixed offset in minutes: `time = utc_time + utc_offset`."""     def __init__(self, offset):         self.__offset = timedelta(minutes=offset)         hours, minutes = divmod(offset, 60)         #NOTE: the last part is to remind about deprecated POSIX GMT+h timezones         #  that have the opposite sign in the name;         #  the corresponding numeric value is not used e.g., no minutes         self.__name = '<%+03d%02d>%+d' % (hours, minutes, -hours)     def utcoffset(self, dt=None):         return self.__offset     def tzname(self, dt=None):         return self.__name     def dst(self, dt=None):         return timedelta(0)     def __repr__(self):         return 'FixedOffset(%d)' % (self.utcoffset().total_seconds() / 60)