strip date with -07:00 timezone format python

Question

I have a variable 'd' that contains dates in this format:

2015-08-03T09:00:00-07:00
2015-08-03T10:00:00-07:00
2015-08-03T11:00:00-07:00
2015-08-03T12:00:00-07:00
2015-08-03T13:00:00-07:00
2015-08-03T14:00:00-07:00

etc.

I need to strip these dates, but I'm having trouble because of the timezone. If I use d = dt.datetime.strptime(d[:19],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'), only the first 19 characters will appear and the rest of the dates are ignored. If I try d = dt.datetime.strptime(d[:-6],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S, Python doesn't chop off the timezone and I still get the error ValueError: unconverted data remains: -07:00. I don't think I can use the dateutil parser because I've only seen it be used for one date instead of a whole list like I have. What can I do? Thanks!

Yes. I just prefer this format to it being separated by commas — sfischer3394, Aug 03 '15 at 16:57
@sfischer3394, what are you actually wanting to do with the dates? — Padraic Cunningham, Aug 03 '15 at 17:05
@PadraicCunningham, I am trying to strip the dates so I can reformat them to `%Y-%m-%d %H:%M%:S` . I need to use them with other data. — sfischer3394, Aug 03 '15 at 17:07
That's ISO 8601 format, which should give you plenty of keywords to locate solutions online. — Ulrich Eckhardt, Aug 03 '15 at 17:10
related: [How to parse dates with -0400 timezone string in python?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/1101508/4279) — jfs, Aug 04 '15 at 00:51
it seems you are using `d` name for a list and at the same time for a single date (the result of `strptime()`) -- do not do that. The error message does not correspond to the code if `d == '2015-08-03T09:00:00-07:00'` then `datetime.strptime(d[:-6], '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')` works — jfs, Aug 04 '15 at 00:57

Padraic Cunningham · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-03T17:12:04.430

Since you have a list just iterate over and use dateutil.parser:

d = ["2015-08-03T09:00:00-07:00","2015-08-03T10:00:00-07:00","2015-08-03T11:00:00-07:00","2015-08-03T12:00:00-07:00",
     "2015-08-03T13:00:00-07:00","2015-08-03T14:00:00-07:00"]

from dateutil import parser

for dte in d:
    print(parser.parse(dte))

If for some reason you actually want to ignore the timezone you can use rsplit with datetime.strptime:

from datetime import datetime

for dte in d:
    print(datetime.strptime(dte.rsplit("-",1)[0],"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"))

If you had a single string delimited by commas then just use d.split(",")

You can use strftime to format the string in any format you want if you actually want a string:

for dte in d:
    print(datetime.strptime(dte.rsplit("-",1)[0],"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S").strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

This worked great. I used your second option. Thanks for your help! — sfischer3394, Aug 03 '15 at 17:14

strip date with -07:00 timezone format python

1 Answers1