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

If you are on Linux, then you can use the external date command to dwim:

import commands, datetime

def parsedate(text):
  output=commands.getoutput('date -d "%s" +%%s' % text )
  try:
      stamp=eval(output)
  except:
      print output
      raise
  return datetime.datetime.frometimestamp(stamp)

This is of course less portable than dateutil, but slightly more flexible, because date will also accept inputs like "yesterday" or "last year" :-)