datetime - How do I parse timezones with UTC offsets in Python?

Question

Let's say I have a timezone like "2009-08-18 13:52:54-04". I can parse most of it using a line like this:

datetime.strptime(time_string, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

However, I can't get the timezone to work. There's a %Z that handles textual timezones ("EST", "UTC", etc) but I don't see anything that can parse "-04".

Answer 1

Maybe you could use dateutil.parser.parse? That method is also mentioned on wiki.python.org/WorkingWithTime.

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse("2009-08-18 13:52:54-04")
datetime.datetime(2009, 8, 18, 13, 52, 54, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))

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