Parsing a Datetime String into a Django DateTimeField

Question

You can also use Django's implementation. I would in fact prefer it and only use something else, if Django's parser cannot handle the format.

For example:

>>> from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0)
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00+0200')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0, tzinfo=<django.utils.timezone.FixedOffset object at 0x8072546d8>)

To have it converted to the right timezone when none is known, use make_aware from django.utils.timezone.

So ultimately, your parser utility would be:

from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
from django.utils.timezone import is_aware, make_aware

def get_aware_datetime(date_str):
    ret = parse_datetime(date_str)
    if not is_aware(ret):
        ret = make_aware(ret)
    return ret

You can use

import dateutil.parser
dateutil.parser.parse('2008-04-10 11:47:58-05')

Which returns a datetime (that can be assigned to the DateTimeField).

I've been using this:

from django.utils.timezone import get_current_timezone
from datetime import datetime
tz = get_current_timezone()
dt = tz.localize(datetime.strptime(str_date, '%m/%d/%Y'))

If you're using Django Forms, you can specify input_formats to your DateField. See the DateField documentation

If you are wanting to parse arbitrary date information, you could use something like parsedatetime and implement a method that Django calls to do the parsing before it hits the validators. (See this SO answer for a good summary of how validations work and when to insert them)

String format of Django DateTimeField is "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ". Hence, conversion between eachother can be done using strptime() or strptime() using this format.

eg. for string formatted value (2016-10-03T19:00:00.999Z), it can be converted to Django datetime object as :

from datetime import datetime

datetime_str = '2016-10-03T19:00:00.999Z'

datetime_object = datetime.strptime(datetime_str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")