How do I translate an ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object? [duplicate]

Answer 1

aniso8601 should handle this. It also understands timezones, Python 2 and Python 3, and it has a reasonable coverage of the rest of ISO 8601, should you ever need it.

import aniso8601
aniso8601.parse_datetime('2007-03-04T21:08:12')

Answer 2

Here is a super simple way to do these kind of conversions. No parsing, or extra libraries required. It is clean, simple, and fast.

import datetime
import time

################################################
#
# Takes the time (in seconds),
#   and returns a string of the time in ISO8601 format.
# Note: Timezone is UTC
#
################################################

def TimeToISO8601(seconds):
   strKv = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(seconds).strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
   strKv = strKv + "T"
   strKv = strKv + datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(seconds).strftime('%H:%M:%S')
   strKv = strKv +"Z"
   return strKv

################################################
#
# Takes a string of the time in ISO8601 format,
#   and returns the time (in seconds).
# Note: Timezone is UTC
#
################################################

def ISO8601ToTime(strISOTime):
   K1 = 0
   K2 = 9999999999
   K3 = 0
   counter = 0
   while counter < 95:
     K3 = (K1 + K2) / 2
     strK4 = TimeToISO8601(K3)
     if strK4 < strISOTime:
       K1 = K3
     if strK4 > strISOTime:
       K2 = K3
     counter = counter + 1
   return K3

################################################
#
# Takes a string of the time in ISO8601 (UTC) format,
#   and returns a python DateTime object.
# Note: returned value is your local time zone.
#
################################################

def ISO8601ToDateTime(strISOTime):
   return time.gmtime(ISO8601ToTime(strISOTime))


#To test:
Test = "2014-09-27T12:05:06.9876"
print ("The test value is: " + Test)
Ans = ISO8601ToTime(Test)
print ("The answer in seconds is: " + str(Ans))
print ("And a Python datetime object is: " + str(ISO8601ToDateTime(Test)))

Answer 3

I prefer using the dateutil library for timezone handling and generally solid date parsing. If you were to get an ISO 8601 string like: 2010-05-08T23:41:54.000Z you'd have a fun time parsing that with strptime, especially if you didn't know up front whether or not the timezone was included. pyiso8601 has a couple of issues (check their tracker) that I ran into during my usage and it hasn't been updated in a few years. dateutil, by contrast, has been active and worked for me:

import dateutil.parser
yourdate = dateutil.parser.parse(datestring)

Answer 4

Both ways:

Epoch to ISO time:

isoTime = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', time.gmtime(epochTime))

ISO time to Epoch:

epochTime = time.mktime(time.strptime(isoTime, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ'))

Answer 5

You should keep an eye on the timezone information, as you might get into trouble when comparing non-tz-aware datetimes with tz-aware ones.

It's probably the best to always make them tz-aware (even if only as UTC), unless you really know why it wouldn't be of any use to do so.

#-----------------------------------------------
import datetime
import pytz
import dateutil.parser
#-----------------------------------------------

utc = pytz.utc
BERLIN = pytz.timezone('Europe/Berlin')
#-----------------------------------------------

def to_iso8601(when=None, tz=BERLIN):
  if not when:
    when = datetime.datetime.now(tz)
  if not when.tzinfo:
    when = tz.localize(when)
  _when = when.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z")
  return _when[:-8] + _when[-5:] # Remove microseconds
#-----------------------------------------------

def from_iso8601(when=None, tz=BERLIN):
  _when = dateutil.parser.parse(when)
  if not _when.tzinfo:
    _when = tz.localize(_when)
  return _when
#-----------------------------------------------

Answer 6

Arrow looks promising for this:

>>> import arrow
>>> arrow.get('2014-11-13T14:53:18.694072+00:00').datetime
datetime.datetime(2014, 11, 13, 14, 53, 18, 694072, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 0))

Arrow is a Python library that provides a sensible, intelligent way of creating, manipulating, formatting and converting dates and times. Arrow is simple, lightweight and heavily inspired by moment.js and requests.