working with high precision timestamps in python

Question

Hey I am working in python with datetime and I am wondering what the best way to parse this timestamp is.

The timestamps are ISO standard, here is an example "2010-06-19T08:17:14.078685237Z"

Now so far I have used

time = datetime.datetime.strptime(timestamp.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
precisetime = time + datetime.timedelta(0,float("." + timestamp[:-1].split(".")[0]))

This kind of works, but I feel like there should be a more streamlined way (I am very new to python, and I am sure I am doing this like an ass). Also, I have nanoseconds in my timestamp, but only microseconds in my datetime object, is there a better module to work with? I need to be able to do operations on the time such as subtracting times and putting them in the scheduler.

Any better way to go about this?

Answer 1

You can use Numpy's datetime64: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-dev/reference/arrays.datetime.html

It supports nanoseconds and higher precisions.

>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.version.version
'1.7.1'
>>> np.datetime64("2010-06-19T08:17:14.078685237Z", dtype="datetime64[ns]")
numpy.datetime64('2010-06-19T08:17:14.078685237+0000')