Newbie question here and I'm not sure if this is best practice but:
I'm looking to convert a timestamp pulled in from a form submission and change it to ISO. For display reasons, I'd like to keep the time option displayed to the user like: Sept 30th 2017 11am EST. I'm looking to change this into 2017-09-30T11:00:00Z. I'm also trying to get this dynamic so if it is Oct 22nd 2017 10am EST it would result in 2017-10-22T10:00:00Z
You can use the (3rd party) dateutil module to help with parsing the incoming time value:
from dateutil import parser
ts = parser.parse('Sept 30th 2017 11am EST')
print(ts.isoformat())
print(parser.parse('Oct 22nd 2017 10am EST').isoformat())
Output:
2017-09-30T11:00:00 2017-10-22T10:00:00
This does lose the timezone, however, assuming EST is UTC-5:
>>> print(parser.parse('Sept 30th 2017 11am EST', tzinfos={'EST': -(5*3600)}))
2017-09-30 11:00:00-05:00
>>> print(parser.parse('Oct 22nd 2017 10am EST', tzinfos={'EST': -(5*3600)}))
2017-10-22 10:00:00-05:00