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

I’m getting a datetime string in a format like “2009-05-28T16:15:00” (this is ISO 8601, I believe). One hackish option seems to be to parse the string using time.strptime and passing the first six elements of the tuple 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?

Answers:

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Method 1

I prefer using the dateutil library for 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 into during my usage and it hasn’t been updated in a few years. dateutil, by contrast, has been active and worked for me:

from dateutil import parser
yourdate = parser.parse(datestring)

Method 2

Since Python 3.7 and no external libraries, you can use the strptime function from the datetime module:

datetime.datetime.strptime('2019-01-04T16:41:24+0200', "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")

For more formatting options, see here.

Python 2 doesn’t support the %z format specifier, so it’s best to explicitly use Zulu time everywhere if possible:

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

Method 3

Because ISO 8601 allows many variations of optional colons and dashes being present, basically CCYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[Z|(+|-)hh:mm]. If you want to use strptime, you need to strip out those variations first.

The goal is to generate a UTC datetime object.

If you just want a basic case that work for UTC with the Z suffix like 2016-06-29T19:36:29.3453Z:

datetime.datetime.strptime(timestamp.translate(None, ':-'), "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S.%fZ")

If you want to handle timezone offsets like 2016-06-29T19:36:29.3453-0400 or 2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00 use the following. These will convert all variations into something without variable delimiters like 20080903T205635.450686+0500 making it more consistent/easier to parse.

import re
# This regex removes all colons and all
# dashes EXCEPT for the dash indicating + or - utc offset for the timezone
conformed_timestamp = re.sub(r"[:]|([-](?!((d{2}[:]d{2})|(d{4}))$))", '', timestamp)
datetime.datetime.strptime(conformed_timestamp, "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S.%f%z" )

If your system does not support the %z strptime directive (you see something like ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%Y%m%dT%H%M%S.%f%z') then you need to manually offset the time from Z (UTC). Note %z may not work on your system in Python versions < 3 as it depended on the C library support which varies across system/Python build type (i.e., Jython, Cython, etc.).

import re
import datetime

# This regex removes all colons and all
# dashes EXCEPT for the dash indicating + or - utc offset for the timezone
conformed_timestamp = re.sub(r"[:]|([-](?!((d{2}[:]d{2})|(d{4}))$))", '', timestamp)

# Split on the offset to remove it. Use a capture group to keep the delimiter
split_timestamp = re.split(r"([+|-])",conformed_timestamp)
main_timestamp = split_timestamp[0]
if len(split_timestamp) == 3:
    sign = split_timestamp[1]
    offset = split_timestamp[2]
else:
    sign = None
    offset = None

# Generate the datetime object without the offset at UTC time
output_datetime = datetime.datetime.strptime(main_timestamp +"Z", "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S.%fZ" )
if offset:
    # Create timedelta based on offset
    offset_delta = datetime.timedelta(hours=int(sign+offset[:-2]), minutes=int(sign+offset[-2:]))

    # Offset datetime with timedelta
    output_datetime = output_datetime + offset_delta

Method 4

Arrow looks promising for this:

>>> import arrow
>>> arrow.get('2014-11-13T14:53:18.694072+00:00').datetime
datetime.datetime(2014, 11, 13, 14, 53, 18, 694072, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 0))

Arrow is a Python library that provides a sensible, intelligent way of creating, manipulating, formatting and converting dates and times. Arrow is simple, lightweight and heavily inspired by moment.js and requests.

Method 5

You should keep an eye on the timezone information, as you might get into trouble when comparing non-tz-aware datetimes with tz-aware ones.

It’s probably the best to always make them tz-aware (even if only as UTC), unless you really know why it wouldn’t be of any use to do so.

#-----------------------------------------------
import datetime
import pytz
import dateutil.parser
#-----------------------------------------------

utc = pytz.utc
BERLIN = pytz.timezone('Europe/Berlin')
#-----------------------------------------------

def to_iso8601(when=None, tz=BERLIN):
  if not when:
    when = datetime.datetime.now(tz)
  if not when.tzinfo:
    when = tz.localize(when)
  _when = when.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z")
  return _when[:-8] + _when[-5:] # Remove microseconds
#-----------------------------------------------

def from_iso8601(when=None, tz=BERLIN):
  _when = dateutil.parser.parse(when)
  if not _when.tzinfo:
    _when = tz.localize(_when)
  return _when
#-----------------------------------------------

Method 6

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

Method 7

import datetime, time
def convert_enddate_to_seconds(self, ts):
    """Takes ISO 8601 format(string) and converts into epoch time."""
    dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(ts[:-7],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f')+
                datetime.timedelta(hours=int(ts[-5:-3]),
                minutes=int(ts[-2:]))*int(ts[-6:-5]+'1')
    seconds = time.mktime(dt.timetuple()) + dt.microsecond/1000000.0
    return seconds

This also includes the milliseconds and time zone.

If the time is ‘2012-09-30T15:31:50.262-08:00’, this will convert into epoch time.

>>> import datetime, time
>>> ts = '2012-09-30T15:31:50.262-08:00'
>>> dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(ts[:-7],'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f')+ datetime.timedelta(hours=int(ts[-5:-3]), minutes=int(ts[-2:]))*int(ts[-6:-5]+'1')
>>> seconds = time.mktime(dt.timetuple()) + dt.microsecond/1000000.0
>>> seconds
1348990310.26

Method 8

Both ways:

Epoch to ISO time:

isoTime = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', time.gmtime(epochTime))

ISO time to Epoch:

epochTime = time.mktime(time.strptime(isoTime, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ'))

Method 9

Isodate seems to have the most complete support.

Method 10

aniso8601 should handle this. It also understands timezones, Python 2 and Python 3, and it has a reasonable coverage of the rest of ISO 8601, should you ever need it.

import aniso8601
aniso8601.parse_datetime('2007-03-04T21:08:12')

Method 11

Here is a super simple way to do these kind of conversions.
No parsing, or extra libraries required.
It is clean, simple, and fast.

import datetime
import time

################################################
#
# Takes the time (in seconds),
#   and returns a string of the time in ISO8601 format.
# Note: Timezone is UTC
#
################################################

def TimeToISO8601(seconds):
   strKv = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(seconds).strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
   strKv = strKv + "T"
   strKv = strKv + datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(seconds).strftime('%H:%M:%S')
   strKv = strKv +"Z"
   return strKv

################################################
#
# Takes a string of the time in ISO8601 format,
#   and returns the time (in seconds).
# Note: Timezone is UTC
#
################################################

def ISO8601ToTime(strISOTime):
   K1 = 0
   K2 = 9999999999
   K3 = 0
   counter = 0
   while counter < 95:
     K3 = (K1 + K2) / 2
     strK4 = TimeToISO8601(K3)
     if strK4 < strISOTime:
       K1 = K3
     if strK4 > strISOTime:
       K2 = K3
     counter = counter + 1
   return K3

################################################
#
# Takes a string of the time in ISO8601 (UTC) format,
#   and returns a python DateTime object.
# Note: returned value is your local time zone.
#
################################################

def ISO8601ToDateTime(strISOTime):
   return time.gmtime(ISO8601ToTime(strISOTime))


#To test:
Test = "2014-09-27T12:05:06.9876"
print ("The test value is: " + Test)
Ans = ISO8601ToTime(Test)
print ("The answer in seconds is: " + str(Ans))
print ("And a Python datetime object is: " + str(ISO8601ToDateTime(Test)))

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