How to parse dates with -0400 timezone string in Python?

Question

I have a date string of the form \'2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400\'. It seems that previous versions of Python may have supported a %z format tag in strptime for the trailing tim

Answer 1

You can use the parse function from dateutil:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> d = parse('2009/05/13 19:19:30 -0400')
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2009, 5, 13, 19, 19, 30, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))

This way you obtain a datetime object you can then use.

As answered, dateutil2.0 is written for Python 3.0 and does not work with Python 2.x. For Python 2.x dateutil1.5 needs to be used.