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

Here is a fix of the "%z" issue for Python 2.7 and earlier

Instead of using:

datetime.strptime(t,'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M %z')

Use the timedelta to account for the timezone, like this:

from datetime import datetime,timedelta
def dt_parse(t):
    ret = datetime.strptime(t[0:16],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M')
    if t[18]=='+':
        ret-=timedelta(hours=int(t[19:22]),minutes=int(t[23:]))
    elif t[18]=='-':
        ret+=timedelta(hours=int(t[19:22]),minutes=int(t[23:]))
    return ret

Note that the dates would be converted to GMT, which would allow doing date arithmetic without worrying about time zones.