How can I parse a time string containing milliseconds in it with python?

Question

I am able to parse strings containing date/time with time.strptime

>>> import time
>>> time.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S')
(2009, 3, 30, 16, 31, 32, 0, 89, -1)

How can I parse a time string that contains milliseconds?

>>> time.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32.123', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/_strptime.py", line 333, in strptime
    data_string[found.end():])
ValueError: unconverted data remains: .123

Answer 1

Python 2.6 added a new strftime/strptime macro %f, which does microseconds. Not sure if this is documented anywhere. But if you're using 2.6 or 3.0, you can do this:

time.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32.123', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S.%f')

Edit: I never really work with the time module, so I didn't notice this at first, but it appears that time.struct_time doesn't actually store milliseconds/microseconds. You may be better off using datetime, like this:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> a = datetime.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32.123', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S.%f')
>>> a.microsecond
123000