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

An another way is to use specialized parser for ISO-8601 is to use isoparse function of dateutil parser:

from dateutil import parser

date = parser.isoparse("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+01:00")
print(date)

Output:

2008-09-03 20:56:35.450686+01:00

This function is also mentioned in the documentation for the standard Python function datetime.fromisoformat:

A more full-featured ISO 8601 parser, dateutil.parser.isoparse is available in the third-party package dateutil.

Answer 2

New in Python 3.7+

---

The datetime standard library introduced a function for inverting datetime.isoformat().

classmethod datetime.fromisoformat(date_string):

Return a datetime corresponding to a date_string in one of the formats emitted by date.isoformat() and datetime.isoformat().

Specifically, this function supports strings in the format(s):

YYYY-MM-DD[*HH[:MM[:SS[.mmm[mmm]]]][+HH:MM[:SS[.ffffff]]]]

where * can match any single character.

Caution: This does not support parsing arbitrary ISO 8601 strings - it is only intended as the inverse operation of datetime.isoformat().

Example of use:

from datetime import datetime

date = datetime.fromisoformat('2017-01-01T12:30:59.000000')

Answer 3

Starting from Python 3.7, strptime supports colon delimiters in UTC offsets (source). So you can then use:

import datetime
datetime.datetime.strptime('2018-01-31T09:24:31.488670+00:00', '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z')

EDIT:

As pointed out by Martijn, if you created the datetime object using isoformat(), you can simply use datetime.fromisoformat()

Answer 4

Note in Python 2.6+ and Py3K, the %f character catches microseconds.

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")

See issue here

Answer 5

The python-dateutil will throw an exception if parsing invalid date strings, so you may want to catch the exception.

from dateutil import parser
ds = '2012-60-31'
try:
  dt = parser.parse(ds)
except ValueError, e:
  print '"%s" is an invalid date' % ds

Answer 6

def parseISO8601DateTime(datetimeStr):
    import time
    from datetime import datetime, timedelta

    def log_date_string(when):
        gmt = time.gmtime(when)
        if time.daylight and gmt[8]:
            tz = time.altzone
        else:
            tz = time.timezone
        if tz > 0:
            neg = 1
        else:
            neg = 0
            tz = -tz
        h, rem = divmod(tz, 3600)
        m, rem = divmod(rem, 60)
        if neg:
            offset = '-%02d%02d' % (h, m)
        else:
            offset = '+%02d%02d' % (h, m)

        return time.strftime('%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S ', gmt) + offset

    dt = datetime.strptime(datetimeStr, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ')
    timestamp = dt.timestamp()
    return dt + timedelta(hours=dt.hour-time.gmtime(timestamp).tm_hour)

Note that we should look if the string doesn't ends with Z, we could parse using %z.