Python strptime() and timezones?

Question

I have a CSV dumpfile from a Blackberry IPD backup, created using IPDDump. The date/time strings in here look something like this (where EST is an Australian ti

Answer 1

Your time string is similar to the time format in rfc 2822 (date format in email, http headers). You could parse it using only stdlib:

>>> from email.utils import parsedate_tz
>>> parsedate_tz('Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010')
(2010, 6, 22, 7, 46, 22, 0, 1, -1, -18000)

See solutions that yield timezone-aware datetime objects for various Python versions: parsing date with timezone from an email.

In this format, EST is semantically equivalent to -0500. Though, in general, a timezone abbreviation is not enough, to identify a timezone uniquely.