How do I parse an ISO 8601-formatted date?

Question

I need to parse RFC 3339 strings like \"2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z\" into Python\'s datetime type.

I have found strptime in the Python sta

Answer 1

One straightforward way to convert an ISO 8601-like date string to a UNIX timestamp or datetime.datetime object in all supported Python versions without installing third-party modules is to use the date parser of SQLite.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import with_statement, division, print_function
import sqlite3
import datetime

testtimes = [
    "2016-08-25T16:01:26.123456Z",
    "2016-08-25T16:01:29",
]
db = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
c = db.cursor()
for timestring in testtimes:
    c.execute("SELECT strftime('%s', ?)", (timestring,))
    converted = c.fetchone()[0]
    print("%s is %s after epoch" % (timestring, converted))
    dt = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(int(converted))
    print("datetime is %s" % dt)

Output:

2016-08-25T16:01:26.123456Z is 1472140886 after epoch
datetime is 2016-08-25 12:01:26
2016-08-25T16:01:29 is 1472140889 after epoch
datetime is 2016-08-25 12:01:29