How can I convert a timestamp string with timezone offset to local time?

Question

I am trying to convert a string timestamp into a proper datetime object. The problem I am having is that there is a timezone offset and everything I am doing doesn\'t seem to wo

Answer 1

Here's a stdlib solution:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from email.utils import mktime_tz, parsedate_tz
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(mktime_tz(parsedate_tz(u"Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:08:23 -0700")))
datetime.datetime(2010, 7, 16, 16, 8, 23) # your local time may be different

See also, Python: parsing date with timezone from an email.

Note: fromtimestamp() may fail if the local timezone had different UTC offset in the past (2010) and if it does not use a historical timezone database on the given platform. To fix it, you could use tzlocal.get_localzone(), to get a pytz tzinfo object representing your local timezone. pytz provides access to the tz database in a portable manner:

>>> timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz(u"Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:08:23 -0700"))
>>> import tzlocal # $ pip install tzlocal
>>> str(datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp, tzlocal.get_localzone()))
'2010-07-16 16:08:23+02:00'