How to convert a timezone aware string to datetime in Python without dateutil?

As of Python 3.7, datetime.datetime.fromisoformat() can handle your format:

>>> import datetime>>> datetime.datetime.fromisoformat('2012-11-01T04:16:13-04:00')datetime.datetime(2012, 11, 1, 4, 16, 13, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(days=-1, seconds=72000)))

In older Python versions you can't, not without a whole lot of painstaking manual timezone defining.

Python does not include a timezone database, because it would be outdated too quickly. Instead, Python relies on external libraries, which can have a far faster release cycle, to provide properly configured timezones for you.

As a side-effect, this means that timezone parsing also needs to be an external library. If dateutil is too heavy-weight for you, use iso8601 instead, it'll parse your specific format just fine:

>>> import iso8601>>> iso8601.parse_date('2012-11-01T04:16:13-04:00')datetime.datetime(2012, 11, 1, 4, 16, 13, tzinfo=<FixedOffset '-04:00'>)

iso8601 is a whopping 4KB small. Compare that tot python-dateutil's 148KB.

As of Python 3.2 Python can handle simple offset-based timezones, and %z will parse -hhmm and +hhmm timezone offsets in a timestamp. That means that for a ISO 8601 timestamp you'd have to remove the : in the timezone:

>>> from datetime import datetime>>> iso_ts = '2012-11-01T04:16:13-04:00'>>> datetime.strptime(''.join(iso_ts.rsplit(':', 1)), '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z')datetime.datetime(2012, 11, 1, 4, 16, 13, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(-1, 72000)))

The lack of proper ISO 8601 parsing is being tracked in Python issue 15873.

Here is the Python Doc for datetime object using dateutil package..

from dateutil.parser import parseget_date_obj = parse("2012-11-01T04:16:13-04:00")print get_date_obj

There are two issues with the code in the original question: there should not be a : in the timezone and the format string for "timezone as an offset" is lower case %z not upper %Z.

This works for me in Python v3.6

>>> from datetime import datetime>>> t = datetime.strptime("2012-11-01T04:16:13-0400", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")>>> print(t)2012-11-01 04:16:13-04:00