Parsing a Datetime String into a Django DateTimeField

Question

I have a Django app with a model that contains a field of type DateTimeField.
I am pulling data from the web in the format of 2008-04-10 11:47:58-05.
I believe that the last 3 characters in this example are the timezone.
How can I preserve that data in the DateTimeField, and is there an easy conversion between the two? Setting the DateTimeField to simply contain a string of the above format throws a ValidationError.

Thank you!

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8636760/parsing-a-datetime-string-into-a-django-datetimefield

Answer 1

You can also use Django's implementation. I would in fact prefer it and only use something else, if Django's parser cannot handle the format.

For example:

>>> from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0)
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00+0200')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0, tzinfo=<django.utils.timezone.FixedOffset object at 0x8072546d8>)

To have it converted to the right timezone when none is known, use make_aware from django.utils.timezone.

So ultimately, your parser utility would be:

from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
from django.utils.timezone import is_aware, make_aware

def get_aware_datetime(date_str):
    ret = parse_datetime(date_str)
    if not is_aware(ret):
        ret = make_aware(ret)
    return ret