How to convert date string with timezone to datetime in python-CodePudding

I need to compare two date string and for that, I need to convert the date string to datetime object. An example of a date string is "2015-08-23T03:36:30-05:00". I am assuming "-05:00" is the timezone string. I could to convert the string to datetime using below approach:

import datetime

str = '2015-08-23T03:36:30-05:00'

datetime.datetime.strptime(str,"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S-%f:00")

I can see the value of microsecond as 50000 which seems wrong to me as the -5:00 value is the timezone. What is the correct way to parse as I will be comparing two datetimes?

CodePudding user response：

You could use %z to parse timezone info:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timezone
>>> datetime.strptime(str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 23, 3, 36, 30, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(days=-1, seconds=68400)))

Then, if you want to convert this datetime to UTC (which I assume is your goal since you say you want to compare datetimes), you could use astimezone method:

>>> datetime.strptime(str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z").astimezone(timezone.utc)
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 23, 8, 36, 30, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Back in string format:

>>> datetime.strptime(str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z").astimezone(timezone.utc).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
'2015-08-23 08:36:30'