Parsing a time instant in python

Question

I am relatively new to python. I have a timestamp of the format - 2016-12-04T21:16:31.265Z. It is of a type string. I want to know how can I parse the above timestamp in python.

I was looking through the datetime library, but seems like it accepts only floats. How do I get the time stamp parsed? I was trying to hunt for something like an equivalent of Instant (in java) for python?

"I was looking through the datetime library, but seems like it accepts only floats." Where or how did you get this impression? — roganjosh, Feb 09 '17 at 23:49
ran a python script on my desktop and it produced errors. I guess I wasn't completely following the instructions 100% — chrisrhyno2003, Feb 09 '17 at 23:50
try `import datetime; datetime.datetime.strptime("2016-12-04T21:16:31.265Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")` — chickity china chinese chicken, Feb 09 '17 at 23:58
possible dupe of [How to parse an ISO 8601-formatted date?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-iso-8601-formatted-date) — chickity china chinese chicken, Feb 10 '17 at 00:05

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 10 '17 at 00:03

4

import datetime
time_str = '2016-12-04T21:16:31.265Z'
time_stamp = datetime.datetime.strptime(time_str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")
print(time_stamp)

Reference: https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html; (8.1.7. strftime() and strptime() Behavior)

edited Feb 10 '17 at 00:03

roganjosh

12,594
4
29
46

answered Feb 10 '17 at 00:02

ju.

1,016
1
13
34

Ricardo Branco · Answer 2 · 2017-02-10T00:11:16.757

-1

To parse it according to your current timezone, using the format used by the Unix date command:

import re
from calendar import timegm
from datetime import datetime
from time import localtime, strptime, strftime

fmt = "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z %Y"
ts = "2016-12-04T21:16:31.265Z"
strftime(fmt, localtime(timegm(strptime(re.sub("\.\d+Z$", "GMT", ts), '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z'))))

edited Feb 10 '17 at 00:11

answered Feb 10 '17 at 00:08

Ricardo Branco

5,740
1
21
31

This a copy/paste dump from a project? Where is `sleep` used? – roganjosh Feb 10 '17 at 00:10
Yes, It's code that I used to parse the ISO-8601 dates included in the Docker Registry manifests. – Ricardo Branco Feb 10 '17 at 00:13
I don't think I'd like to maintain a library of `time` and `datetime` modules that also requires regex on top. – roganjosh Feb 10 '17 at 00:15

Parsing a time instant in python

2 Answers2