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

A simple option from one of the comments: replace 'Z' with '+00:00' - and use Python3.7+'s fromisoformat.

from datetime import datetime

s = "2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z"

datetime.fromisoformat(s.replace('Z', '+00:00'))
# datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Although strptime can parse the 'Z' character, fromisoformat is faster by ~ x40 (see also: A faster strptime):

%timeit datetime.fromisoformat(s.replace('Z', '+00:00'))
387 ns ± 20.4 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

%timeit datetime.strptime(s, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z')
15.3 µs ± 540 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)