How to parse dates with -0400 timezone string in Python?

user_135336 0
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I have a date string of the form '2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400'. It seems that previous versions of Python may have supported a %z format tag in strptime for the trailing timezone specification, but 2.6.x seems to have removed that.

What's the right way to parse this string into a datetime object?

timezone datetime python
6 Answers

You can use the parse function from dateutil:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> d = parse('2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400')
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2009, 5, 13, 19, 19, 30, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))

This way you obtain a datetime object you can then use.

As answered, dateutil2.0 is written for Python 3.0 and does not work with Python 2.x. For Python 2.x dateutil1.5 needs to be used.

user_1351720

One liner for old Pythons out there. You can multiply a timedelta by 1/-1 depending on +/- sign, as in:

datetime.strptime(s[:19], '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S') + timedelta(hours=int(s[20:22]), minutes=int(s[23:])) * (-1 if s[19] == '+' else 1)
user_16692940

If you are on Linux, then you can use the external date command to dwim:

import commands, datetime

def parsedate(text):
  output=commands.getoutput('date -d "%s" +%%s' % text )
  try:
      stamp=eval(output)
  except:
      print output
      raise
  return datetime.datetime.frometimestamp(stamp)

This is of course less portable than dateutil, but slightly more flexible, because date will also accept inputs like "yesterday" or "last year" :-)

user_1178140
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