Python identify timestamp format from string

Question

If I have a string of timestamp, is there some python library that can identify the format of timestamp and give me a datetime object? Example of a string is:

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 07:50:17 GMT

Can you also give an example of how it can be done?

Answer 1

Use dateutil. You can install it with pip.

from dateutil.parser import parse
dt = parse('Sat, 16 Jan 2016 07:50:17 GMT')
print(dt)
print(type(dt))

Output

2016-01-16 07:50:17+00:00
<type 'datetime.datetime'>