Python datetime parse timezone (RFC3339)

Question

Currently I'm writing a small python application where I get a date of the following format (RFC3339) from a webserver:

2016-01-29T20:00:00+01:00

I have to parse this date to a python datetime object and for this I would like to use the datetime.strptime method where I have to specify the format of the date but I don't know how to parse the timezone (+01:00) I tried with:

datetime.strptime(strDate, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")

but this does not work. Can you please tell me which format string I have to use?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 25 '16 at 13:31

You could use dateutil, however, if you are using Python 3 it only works for 3.2 or 3.3. It also supports Python 2 on 2.6 and 2.7.

The solution I would suggest:

from dateutil.parser import parse

string = "2016-01-29T20:00:00+01:00"

date = parse(string)

This will give you a datetime object like so:

Out[1]: 2016-01-29 20:00:00+01:00
Out[2]: datetime.datetime(2016, 1, 29, 20, 0, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 3600))

If you'd like to know more, check dateutil documentation.

Moreover, I believe the reason strptime doesn't work straight away here is due to that 'T' on your date string. It's not the format strptime expects. Luckily dateutil parse method works right out of the box to fix that string for you.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 25 '16 at 13:24

2

Can you do this,

strDate = strDate.split('+')

datetime.strptime(strDate[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")

This will work for you

answered Feb 25 '16 at 13:24

Kamlesh

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...but discarding the timezone creates a [naive object](https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#module-datetime). Presumably the OP wants an aware one. – ChrisGPT was on strike Feb 25 '16 at 13:27
Yaah i got this @Charles David's ans is ryt – Kamlesh Feb 25 '16 at 13:39

Python datetime parse timezone (RFC3339)

2 Answers2