[python] How do you convert a time.struct_time object into a datetime object?

How do you convert a Python time.struct_time object into a datetime.datetime object?

I have a library that provides the first one and a second library that wants the second one.

This question is related to python datetime

The answer is


This is not a direct answer to your question (which was answered pretty well already). However, having had times bite me on the fundament several times, I cannot stress enough that it would behoove you to look closely at what your time.struct_time object is providing, vs. what other time fields may have.

Assuming you have both a time.struct_time object, and some other date/time string, compare the two, and be sure you are not losing data and inadvertently creating a naive datetime object, when you can do otherwise.

For example, the excellent feedparser module will return a "published" field and may return a time.struct_time object in its "published_parsed" field:

time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=23, tm_min=57, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=252, tm_isdst=0)

Now note what you actually get with the "published" field.

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 19:57:42 -0400

By Stallman's Beard! Timezone information!

In this case, the lazy man might want to use the excellent dateutil module to keep the timezone information:

from dateutil import parser
dt = parser.parse(entry["published"])
print "published", entry["published"])
print "dt", dt
print "utcoffset", dt.utcoffset()
print "tzinfo", dt.tzinfo
print "dst", dt.dst()

which gives us:

published Mon, 09 Sep 2013 19:57:42 -0400
dt 2013-09-09 19:57:42-04:00
utcoffset -1 day, 20:00:00
tzinfo tzoffset(None, -14400)
dst 0:00:00

One could then use the timezone-aware datetime object to normalize all time to UTC or whatever you think is awesome.


Like this:

>>> structTime = time.localtime()
>>> datetime.datetime(*structTime[:6])
datetime.datetime(2009, 11, 8, 20, 32, 35)