Parsing date time with UTC offset in python 3.6

Question

I run into the problem while parsing datetime from string. I compiled my findings into simple example:

import datetime
# Works in python 3.6 as well as 3.7 and newer
value2 = '2012-12-03T07:16:23+0000'
print(datetime.datetime.strptime(value2, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z'))

# Works only in python 3.7 and newer
value = '2012-12-03T07:16:23+00:00'
print(datetime.datetime.strptime(value, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z'))

For some reason python 3.6 cannot parse string containing timezone information in standard form of xx:xx. Does anybody know how to solve this issue?

Answer 1

I run into the same issue. After debugging found that that 3.6 does not have support for datetime with colon. The work around of the problem there are two solution

1. upgrade python version to python3.7. As python 3.7 documentation states here:

utcoffset() is transformed into a string of the form ±HHMM[SS[.ffffff]], where HH is a 2-digit string giving the number of UTC offset hours, MM is a 2-digit string giving the number of UTC offset minutes, SS is a 2-digit string giving the number of UTC offset seconds and ffffff is a 6-digit string giving the number of UTC offset microseconds.

Changed in version 3.7: When the %z directive is provided to the strptime() method, the UTC offsets can have a colon as a separator between hours, minutes and seconds. For example, '+01:00:00' will be parsed as an offset of one hour. In addition, providing 'Z' is identical to '+00:00'.

2. apply some hack to remove colon (or whole timezone part if not needed)

• 2.1. Replace colon with ''

   import datetime
   value = '2012-12-03T07:16:23+00:00' 
   value = value.replace(':', '') 
   print(datetime.datetime.strptime(value, '%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%S%z'))
  

• 2.2. remove the zone part from date srt

   import datetime
   value = '2012-12-03T07:16:23+00:00'
   value = value.split('+', maxsplit=1)[0]
   print(datetime.datetime.strptime(value, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'))