datetime - Python strptime() and timezones?

Question

I have a CSV dumpfile from a Blackberry IPD backup, created using IPDDump. The date/time strings in here look something like this (where EST is an Australian time-zone):

Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010

I need to be able to parse this date in Python. At first, I tried to use the strptime() function from datettime.

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Tue Jun 22 12:10:20 2010 EST', '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %Z')

However, for some reason, the datetime object that comes back doesn't seem to have any tzinfo associated with it.

I did read on this page that apparently datetime.strptime silently discards tzinfo, however, I checked the documentation, and I can't find anything to that effect documented here.

I have been able to get the date parsed using a third-party Python library, dateutil, however I'm still curious as to how I was using the in-built strptime() incorrectly? Is there any way to get strptime() to play nicely with timezones?

Answer 1

I recommend using python-dateutil. Its parser has been able to parse every date format I've thrown at it so far.

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse("Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010")
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 22, 7, 46, 22, tzinfo=tzlocal())
>>> parser.parse("Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:18:09 -0400")
datetime.datetime(2011, 11, 11, 3, 18, 9, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))
>>> parser.parse("Sun")
datetime.datetime(2011, 12, 18, 0, 0)
>>> parser.parse("10-11-08")
datetime.datetime(2008, 10, 11, 0, 0)

and so on. No dealing with strptime() format nonsense... just throw a date at it and it Does The Right Thing.

Update: Oops. I missed in your original question that you mentioned that you used dateutil, sorry about that. But I hope this answer is still useful to other people who stumble across this question when they have date parsing questions and see the utility of that module.