Python date iso8601 format with timezone designator

Question

I'm sending some dates from server that has it's time in gmt-6 format, but when i convert them to isoformat i don't get the tz designator at the end.

I'm currently setting the date like this:

date.isoformat()

but I'm getting this string: 2012-09-27T11:25:04 without the tz designator.

how can I do this?

[This answer on another thread](https://stackoverflow.com/a/28147286/1717535) has a section with "UTC to ISO 8601 with TimeZone information (Python 3)". — Fabien Snauwaert, Jul 06 '22 at 11:12

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited May 09 '19 at 02:10

10

You're not getting the timezone designator because the datetime is not aware (ie, it doesn't have a tzinfo):

>>> import pytz
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.now().isoformat()
'2012-09-27T14:24:13.595373'
>>> tz = pytz.timezone("America/Toronto")
>>> aware_dt = tz.localize(datetime.now())
>>> datetime.datetime(2012, 9, 27, 14, 25, 8, 881440, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/Toronto' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)
>>> aware_dt.isoformat()
'2012-09-27T14:25:08.881440-04:00'

In the past, when I've had to deal with an unaware datetime which I know to represent a time in a particular timezone, I've simply appended the timezone:

>>> datetime.now().isoformat() + "-04:00"
'2012-09-27T14:25:08.881440-04:00'

Or combine the approaches with:

>>> datetime.now().isoformat() + datetime.now(pytz.timezone("America/Toronto")).isoformat()[26:]
'2012-09-27T14:25:08.881440-04:00'

edited May 09 '19 at 02:10

A T

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answered Sep 27 '12 at 18:25

David Wolever

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Ok I thought of appending the tz, but I didn't know the format, I guess it would be -06:00. But what is the 881440 portion, is that part of the timezone? – madprops Sep 27 '12 at 18:31
Ah, my current time string doesn't include that, would it still work without them? – madprops Sep 27 '12 at 18:33
1

For directly generating in UTC: ```datetime.now(pytz.utc)``` – dhackner Jan 17 '14 at 16:23

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 25 '20 at 07:11

1

It is much easier to deal with dates with a specialized module such as arrow or delorean

>>> import arrow
>>> arrow.now().isoformat()
'2020-11-25T08:10:39.672624+01:00'

answered Nov 25 '20 at 07:11

WoJ

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Python date iso8601 format with timezone designator

2 Answers2