How do I translate an ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object?

python datetime iso8601 datetime-parsing
Andrey Fedorov picture Andrey Fedorov · Jun 9, 2009 · Viewed 420k times · Source

I'm getting a datetime string in a format like "2009-05-28T16:15:00" (this is ISO 8601, I believe). One hackish option seems to be to parse the string using time.strptime and passing the first six elements of the tuple into the datetime constructor, like:

datetime.datetime(*time.strptime("2007-03-04T21:08:12", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")[:6])

I haven't been able to find a "cleaner" way of doing this. Is there one?

Answer

Wes Winham picture Wes Winham · Oct 11, 2010

I prefer using the dateutil library for timezone handling and generally solid date parsing. If you were to get an ISO 8601 string like: 2010-05-08T23:41:54.000Z you'd have a fun time parsing that with strptime, especially if you didn't know up front whether or not the timezone was included. pyiso8601 has a couple of issues (check their tracker) that I ran into during my usage and it hasn't been updated in a few years. dateutil, by contrast, has been active and worked for me: 

import dateutil.parser
yourdate = dateutil.parser.parse(datestring)

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