Converting utc time string to datetime object

Question

I\'m using the Paypal API and I get back a timestamp in the following format. It try to parse this to a datetime object using strptime, but I get the following error:

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Answer 1

The parser from dateutil is your friend.

You'll have to pip install dateutil but you've save bags and bags of date conversion code:

pip install python-dateutil

You can use it like this.

from dateutil import parser
ds = '2012-03-01T10:00:00Z' # or any date sting of differing formats.
date = parser.parse(ds)

You'll find you can deal with almost any date string formats with this parser and you'll get a nice standard python date back