Python strptime and timezones

Question

I have a CSV dumpfile from a Blackberry IPD backup  created using IPDDump  The date time strings in here look something like this  where EST is an Australian time-zone    Tue Jun 22 07 46 22 EST 2010   I need to be able to parse this date in Python  At first  I tried to use the strptime   function from datettime    gt  gt  gt  datetime datetime strptime  Tue Jun 22 12 10 20 2010 EST     a  b  d  H  M  S  Y  Z     However  for some reason  the datetime object that comes back doesn t seem to have any tzinfo associated with it   I did read on this page that apparently datetime strptime silently discards tzinfo  however  I checked the documentation  and I can t find anything to that effect documented here   I have been able to get the date parsed using a third-party Python library  dateutil  however I m still curious as to how I was using the in-built strptime   incorrectly   Is there any way to get strptime   to play nicely with timezones

User · Answer

I recommend using python-dateutil   Its parser has been able to parse every date format I ve thrown at it so far    gt  gt  gt  from dateutil import parser  gt  gt  gt  parser parse  Tue Jun 22 07 46 22 EST 2010   datetime datetime 2010  6  22  7  46  22  tzinfo tzlocal     gt  gt  gt  parser parse  Fri  11 Nov 2011 03 18 09 -0400   datetime datetime 2011  11  11  3  18  9  tzinfo tzoffset None  -14400    gt  gt  gt  parser parse  Sun   datetime datetime 2011  12  18  0  0   gt  gt  gt  parser parse  10-11-08   datetime datetime 2008  10  11  0  0    and so on   No dealing with strptime   format nonsense    just throw a date at it and it Does The Right Thing   Update  Oops   I missed in your original question that you mentioned that you used dateutil  sorry about that   But I hope this answer is still useful to other people who stumble across this question when they have date parsing questions and see the utility of that module

User · Answer

Your time string is similar to the time format in rfc 2822  date format in email  http headers   You could parse it using only stdlib    gt  gt  gt  from email utils import parsedate tz  gt  gt  gt  parsedate tz  Tue Jun 22 07 46 22 EST 2010    2010  6  22  7  46  22  0  1  -1  -18000    See solutions that yield timezone-aware datetime objects for various Python versions  parsing date with timezone from an email   In this format   EST is semantically equivalent to -0500  Though  in general  a timezone abbreviation is not enough  to identify a timezone uniquely

User · Answer

Since strptime returns a datetime object which has tzinfo attribute  We can simply replace it with desired timezone   gt  gt  gt  import datetime   gt  gt  gt  date time str    2018-06-29 08 15 27 243860   gt  gt  gt  date time obj   datetime datetime strptime date time str    Y- m- d  H  M  S  f   replace tzinfo datetime timezone utc   gt  gt  gt  date time obj tzname    UTC

User · Answer

The datetime module documentation says      Return a datetime corresponding to date string  parsed according to format  This is equivalent to datetime   time strptime date string  format  0 6       See that  0 6   That gets you  year  month  day  hour  minute  second   Nothing else  No mention of timezones   Interestingly   Win XP SP2  Python 2 6  2 7  passing your example to time strptime doesn t work but if you strip off the    Z  and the   EST  it does work  Also using  UTC  or  GMT  instead of  EST  works   PST  and  MEZ  don t work  Puzzling   It s worth noting this has been updated as of version 3 2 and the same documentation now also states the following      When the  z directive is provided to the strptime   method  an aware datetime object will be produced  The tzinfo of the result will be set to a timezone instance    Note that this doesn t work with  Z  so the case is important  See the following example   In  1   from datetime import datetime  In  2   start time   datetime strptime  2018-04-18-17-04-30-AEST    Y- m- d- H- M- S- Z    In  3   print  TZ NAME   tz   format tz start time tzname     TZ NAME  None  In  4   start time   datetime strptime  2018-04-18-17-04-30- 1000    Y- m- d- H- M- S- z    In  5   print  TZ NAME   tz   format tz start time tzname     TZ NAME  UTC 10 00

User · Answer

Ran into this exact problem   What I ended up doing      starting with date string sdt    20190901  std format     Y m d     create naive datetime object from datetime import datetime dt   datetime strptime sdt  sdt format     extract the relevant date time items dt formatters      Y    m    d   dt vals   tuple map lambda formatter  int datetime strftime dt formatter    dt formatters      set timezone import pendulum tz   pendulum timezone  utc    dt tz   datetime  dt vals tzinfo tz

[python] Python strptime() and timezones?

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