datetime.strptime(‘2017-01-12T14:12:06.000-0500’,'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%Z')

Question

I've been trying to convert this specific date format to a string in Python like so:

datetime.strptime(‘2017-01-12T14:12:06.000-0500’,'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%Z')

But it doesn't work.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Solution for Python 2.7

From the comments it became clear that OP needs a solution for Python 2.7.

Apparently, there's no %z in strptime for python 2.7 even though the documentation claims the contrary, the raised error is ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000%z'.

To solve this, you need to parse the date without timezone first and add the timezone later. Unfortunately you need to subclass tzinfo for that. This answer is based on this answer

from datetime import datetime, timedelta, tzinfo

class FixedOffset(tzinfo):
    """offset_str: Fixed offset in str: e.g. '-0400'"""
    def __init__(self, offset_str):
        sign, hours, minutes = offset_str[0], offset_str[1:3], offset_str[3:]
        offset = (int(hours) * 60 + int(minutes)) * (-1 if sign == "-" else 1)
        self.__offset = timedelta(minutes=offset)
        # NOTE: the last part is to remind about deprecated POSIX GMT+h timezones
        # that have the opposite sign in the name;
        # the corresponding numeric value is not used e.g., no minutes
        '<%+03d%02d>%+d' % (int(hours), int(minutes), int(hours)*-1)
    def utcoffset(self, dt=None):
        return self.__offset
    def tzname(self, dt=None):
        return self.__name
    def dst(self, dt=None):
        return timedelta(0)
    def __repr__(self):
        return 'FixedOffset(%d)' % (self.utcoffset().total_seconds() / 60)

date_with_tz = "2017-01-12T14:12:06.000-0500"
date_str, tz = date_with_tz[:-5], date_with_tz[-5:]
dt_utc = datetime.strptime(date_str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f")
dt = dt_utc.replace(tzinfo=FixedOffset(tz))
print(dt)

The last line prints:

2017-01-12 14:12:06-05:00