Parsing an ISO datetime in Python
Question: > **Possible Duplicate:**  
>  [Converting string to datetime object in
> python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2609259/converting-string-to-
> datetime-object-in-python)

Given the below Python

    
    
    import datetime
    
    >>> a
    '2011-05-04 16:20:09 -0700'
    >>> datetime.datetime.strptime(a, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/usr/lib/python2.6/_strptime.py", line 317, in _strptime
        (bad_directive, format))
    ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z'
    >>> 
    

I don't really understand how `%z` is a bad directive.

Reference: <http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-
behavior>

This is from hg, which says that it is in ISO8601 format.


Answer: Here is the complete story:

<http://bugs.python.org/issue6641>

and related:

[Converting string to datetime object in
python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2609259/converting-string-to-
datetime-object-in-python)

