How do I translate a ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object?

Question

I'm getting a datetime string in a format like "2009-05-28T16:15:00" (this is ISO 8601, I believe) one hack-ish option seems to be to parse the string using time.strptime and passing the first 6 elements of the touple into the datetime constructor, like:

datetime.datetime(*time.strptime("2007-03-04T21:08:12", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")[:6])

I haven't been able to find a "cleaner" way of doing this, is there one?

Answer 1

With Pyhon 2.5:

datetime.datetime.strptime( "2007-03-04T21:08:12", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S" )

Answer 2

I haven't tried it yet, but pyiso8601 promises to support this.

Answer 3

I prefer using the dateutil library for it's 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 in to 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

Isodate seems to have the most complete support.