How do I parse an ISO 8601-formatted date?

Question

I need to parse RFC 3339 strings like \"2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z\" into Python\'s datetime type.

I have found strptime in the Python sta

Answer 1

I have found ciso8601 to be the fastest way to parse ISO 8601 timestamps. As the name suggests, it is implemented in C.

import ciso8601
ciso8601.parse_datetime('2014-01-09T21:48:00.921000+05:30')

The GitHub Repo README shows their >10x speedup versus all of the other libraries listed in the other answers.

My personal project involved a lot of ISO 8601 parsing. It was nice to be able to just switch the call and go 10x faster. :)

Edit: I have since become a maintainer of ciso8601. It's now faster than ever!