Python timezone '%z' directive for datetime.strptime() not available

python datetime tzinfo
c24b picture c24b · Oct 2, 2014 · Viewed 61.2k times · Source

Using '%z' pattern of datetime.strptime()

I have a string text that represent a date and I'm perfectly able to parse it and transform it into a clean datetime object:

date = "[24/Aug/2014:17:57:26"
dt = datetime.strptime(date, "[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S")

Except that I can't catch the entire date string with the timezone using the %z pattern as specified here

date_tz = 24/Aug/2014:17:57:26 +0200
dt = datetime.strptime(date, "[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z]")
>>> ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z]'

Because as this bug report says

strftime() is implemented per platform

I precise that there is no such a problem with the naive tzinfo directive '%Z'

Workaround : Casting tzinfo string into tzinfo object

I can perfectly make the following workaround by transforming the GST time format string into a tzinfo object [as suggested here][4] using dateutil module and then insert tzinfo into datetime object

Question: Make %z available for my plateform?

But as I will obviously need %z pattern for further project I would like to find a solution to avoid this workaround and using external module for this simple task. Can you suggest me some reading on it? I supposed that newer version of python (I'm on 2.7) can handle it but I'd rather not changing my version now for this little but crucial detail.

[EDIT]

Well, seeing comments make me reformulated my question how to parse Email time zone indicator using strptime() without being aware of locale time?

Answer

jfs picture jfs · Oct 3, 2014

strptime() is implemented in pure Python. Unlike strftime(); it [which directives are supported] doesn't depend on platform. %z is supported since Python 3.2:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime('24/Aug/2014:17:57:26 +0200', '%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z')
datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 24, 17, 57, 26, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0, 7200)))

how to parse Email time zone indicator using strptime() without being aware of locale time?

There is no concrete timezone implementation in Python 2.7. You could easily implement the UTC offset parsing, see How to parse dates with -0400 timezone string in python?

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