dateutil.parser.parse() and lost timezone information

timezone.now will give you an aware datetime object if USE_TZ is true. You don't need to parse it further.

In this example, USE_TZ is True, and the timezone is set to UTC:

>>> from django.utils import timezone as djtz>>> i = djtz.now()>>> type(i)<type 'datetime.datetime'>>>> i.tzinfo<UTC>

As far as dateutil goes, it will parse your string correctly:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse>>> s = '2014-07-14 08:51:49.123342+00:00'>>> parse(s).tzinfotzutc()>>> z = parse(s)>>> zdatetime.datetime(2014, 7, 14, 8, 51, 49, 123342, tzinfo=tzutc())

You can see its picking up the correct timezone (UTC in this case).

The default format specifiers only accept +0000 as the offset format with %z, or the three letter timezone name with %Z; but you cannot use this to parse, only to format:

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('2014-07-14 08:51:49.123342+0000', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f%z')Traceback (most recent call last):  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 317, in _strptime    (bad_directive, format))ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f%z'>>> datetime.datetime.strftime(z, '%Z')'UTC'>>> datetime.datetime.strftime(z, '%z')'+0000'