What exactly does the T and Z mean in timestamp?

Question

I have this timestamp value being return by a web service \"2014-09-12T19:34:29Z\"

I know that it means timezone, but what exactly does it mean?

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Answer 1

The T doesn't really stand for anything. It is just the separator that the ISO 8601 combined date-time format requires. You can read it as an abbreviation for Time.

The Z stands for the Zero timezone, as it is offset by 0 from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Both characters are just static letters in the format, which is why they are not documented by the datetime.strftime() method. You could have used Q or M or Monty Python and the method would have returned them unchanged as well; the method only looks for patterns starting with % to replace those with information from the datetime object.