Using strptime to get UTC offset with separation between hours and minutes

Question

I have a string like this 2018-04-03 02:59:59+00:00 and I need to use strptime to convert it to datetime.

However, looking at the docs, the %z (UTC offset) directive is +HHMM, but I need +HH:MM. How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

It is not currently possible using datetime.strptime, because of the colon character in the offset. So, forget strptime and choose one of the options below:

• Pre-process the string to remove the colon from the offset
• Use a dateutil.parser instead of strptime
• Upgrade to Python 3.7

Regarding the last option: there's a new feature provided in 3.7, added specifically to address the issue you're seeing. It's a new datetime method, which can correctly parse your string:

# Python 3.7.0b1
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.fromisoformat('2018-04-03 02:59:59+00:00')
datetime.datetime(2018, 4, 3, 2, 59, 59, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Additionally, Python 3.7 supports colons in the offset for %z if you wanted to stick with strptime.