Converting utc time string to datetime object

Question

I\'m using the Paypal API and I get back a timestamp in the following format. It try to parse this to a datetime object using strptime, but I get the following error:

<

Answer 1

The problem is that you use %M twice. Use %m for the months:

>>> datetime.strptime('2012-03-01T10:00:00Z','%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')
datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 1, 10, 0)

Answer 2

Looks like you're mixing %M (minute) and %m (month).

Answer 3

You have a typo. %M is used twice. You meant to use %m for the month. From the docs:

%m  Month as a decimal number [01,12].   
%M  Minute as a decimal number [00,59].

Answer 4

The parser from dateutil is your friend.

You'll have to pip install dateutil but you've save bags and bags of date conversion code:

pip install python-dateutil

You can use it like this.

from dateutil import parser
ds = '2012-03-01T10:00:00Z' # or any date sting of differing formats.
date = parser.parse(ds)

You'll find you can deal with almost any date string formats with this parser and you'll get a nice standard python date back