Convert python timezone aware datetime string to utc time

Question

I have a Python datetime string that is timezone aware and need to convert it to UTC timestamp.

'2016-07-15T10:00:00-06:00'

Most of the SO links talks about getting the current datetime in UTC but not on converting the given datetime to UTC.

Answer 1

Hi this was a bit tricky, but here is my, probably far from perfect, answer:

[IN]
import datetime
import pytz
date_str = '2016-07-15T10:00:00-06:00'
# Have to get rid of that bothersome final colon for %z to work
datetime_object = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str[:-3] + date_str[-2:], 
'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z')
datetime_object.astimezone(pytz.utc)
[OUT]
datetime.datetime(2016, 7, 15, 16, 0, tzinfo=<UTC>)