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.