How to read timezone aware datetimes as a timezone naive local DatetimeIndex with read_csv in pandas?

Question

When I use pandas read_csv to read a column with a timezone aware datetime (and specify this column to be the index), pandas converts it to a timezone naive utc

Answer 1

I adopted the dateutil technique earlier today but have since switched to a faster alternative:

date_parser = lambda ts: pd.to_datetime([s[:-5] for s in ts]))

Edit: s[:-5] is correct (screenshot has error)

In the screenshot below, I import ~55MB of tab-separated files. The dateutil method works, but takes orders of magnitude longer.

This was using pandas 0.18.1 and dateutil 2.5.3.

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EDIT This lambda function will work even if Z-0000 suffix is missing...

date_parser = lambda ts: pd.to_datetime([s[:-5] if 'Z' in s else s for s in ts])