Parsing a Datetime String into a Django DateTimeField

You can also use Django's implementation. I would in fact prefer it and only use something else, if Django's parser cannot handle the format.

For example:

>>> from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00')datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0)>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00+0200')datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0, tzinfo=<django.utils.timezone.FixedOffset object at 0x8072546d8>)

To have it converted to the right timezone when none is known, use make_aware from django.utils.timezone.

So ultimately, your parser utility would be:

from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetimefrom django.utils.timezone import is_aware, make_awaredef get_aware_datetime(date_str):    ret = parse_datetime(date_str)    if not is_aware(ret):        ret = make_aware(ret)    return ret

You can use

import dateutil.parserdateutil.parser.parse('2008-04-10 11:47:58-05')

Which returns a datetime (that can be assigned to the DateTimeField).

I've been using this:

from django.utils.timezone import get_current_timezonefrom datetime import datetimetz = get_current_timezone()dt = tz.localize(datetime.strptime(str_date, '%m/%d/%Y'))