What exactly does the T and Z mean in timestamp?

python datetime timestamp strftime rfc3339
roymustang86 picture roymustang86 · Mar 26, 2015 · Viewed 96.2k times · Source

I have this timestamp value being return by a web service "2014-09-12T19:34:29Z"

I know that it means timezone, but what exactly does it mean?

And I am trying to mock this web service, so is there a way to generate this timestamp using strftime in python?

Sorry if this is painfully obvious, but Google was not very helpful and neither was the strftime() reference page.

I am currently using this :

x.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z")
'2015-03-26T10:58:51'

Answer

Martijn Pieters picture Martijn Pieters · Mar 26, 2015

The T doesn't really stand for anything. It is just the separator that the ISO 8601 combined date-time format requires. You can read it as an abbreviation for Time.

The Z stands for the Zero timezone, as it is offset by 0 from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Both characters are just static letters in the format, which is why they are not documented by the datetime.strftime() method. You could have used Q or M or Monty Python and the method would have returned them unchanged as well; the method only looks for patterns starting with % to replace those with information from the datetime object.

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