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What exactly does the T and Z mean in timestamp?

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What does Z after a timestamp mean?

The Z stands for 'Zulu' - your times are in UTC. From Wikipedia: The UTC time zone is sometimes denoted by the letter Z—a reference to the equivalent nautical time zone (GMT), which has been denoted by a Z since about 1950.

What does Z stand for in time format?

Z is the zone designator for the zero UTC offset. "09:30 UTC" is therefore represented as "09:30Z" or "T0930Z". "14:45:15 UTC" would be "14:45:15Z" or "T144515Z". The Z suffix in the ISO 8601 time representation is sometimes referred to as "Zulu time" because the same letter is used to designate the Zulu time zone.


The T doesn't really stand for anything. It is just the separator that the ISO 8601 combined date-time format requires. You can read it as an abbreviation for Time.

The Z stands for the Zero timezone, as it is offset by 0 from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Both characters are just static letters in the format, which is why they are not documented by the datetime.strftime() method. You could have used Q or M or Monty Python and the method would have returned them unchanged as well; the method only looks for patterns starting with % to replace those with information from the datetime object.