How do I parse an ISO 8601-formatted date?

isoparse function from python-dateutil

The python-dateutil package has dateutil.parser.isoparse to parse not only RFC 3339 datetime strings like the one in the question, but also other ISO 8601 date and time strings that don't comply with RFC 3339 (such as ones with no UTC offset, or ones that represent only a date).

>>> import dateutil.parser
>>> dateutil.parser.isoparse('2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z') # RFC 3339 format
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> dateutil.parser.isoparse('2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686') # ISO 8601 extended format
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686)
>>> dateutil.parser.isoparse('20080903T205635.450686') # ISO 8601 basic format
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686)
>>> dateutil.parser.isoparse('20080903') # ISO 8601 basic format, date only
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 0, 0)

The python-dateutil package also has dateutil.parser.parse. Compared with isoparse, it is presumably less strict, but both of them are quite forgiving and will attempt to interpret the string that you pass in. If you want to eliminate the possibility of any misreads, you need to use something stricter than either of these functions.

Comparison with Python 3.7+’s built-in datetime.datetime.fromisoformat

datutil.parser.isoparse is a full ISO-8601 format parser, but fromisoformat is deliberately not. Please see the latter function's docs for this cautionary caveat. (See this answer).

The datetime standard library has, since Python 3.7, a function for inverting datetime.isoformat().

classmethod datetime.fromisoformat(date_string):

Return a datetime corresponding to a date_string in one of the formats emitted by date.isoformat() and datetime.isoformat().

Specifically, this function supports strings in the format(s):

YYYY-MM-DD[*HH[:MM[:SS[.mmm[mmm]]]][+HH:MM[:SS[.ffffff]]]]

where * can match any single character.

Caution: This does not support parsing arbitrary ISO 8601 strings - it is only intended as the inverse operation of datetime.isoformat().

Examples:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.fromisoformat('2011-11-04')
datetime.datetime(2011, 11, 4, 0, 0)

…

Be sure to read the caution from the docs!

Note in Python 2.6+ and Py3K, the %f character catches microseconds.

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")

See issue here

Several answers here suggest using datetime.datetime.strptime to parse RFC 3339 or ISO 8601 datetimes with timezones, like the one exhibited in the question:

2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z

This is a bad idea.

Assuming that you want to support the full RFC 3339 format, including support for UTC offsets other than zero, then the code these answers suggest does not work. Indeed, it cannot work, because parsing RFC 3339 syntax using strptime is impossible. The format strings used by Python's datetime module are incapable of describing RFC 3339 syntax.

The problem is UTC offsets. The RFC 3339 Internet Date/Time Format requires that every date-time includes a UTC offset, and that those offsets can either be Z (short for "Zulu time") or in +HH:MM or -HH:MM format, like +05:00 or -10:30.

Consequently, these are all valid RFC 3339 datetimes:

• 2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z
• 2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00
• 2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686-10:30

Alas, the format strings used by strptime and strftime have no directive that corresponds to UTC offsets in RFC 3339 format. A complete list of the directives they support can be found at https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior, and the only UTC offset directive included in the list is %z:

%z

UTC offset in the form +HHMM or -HHMM (empty string if the the object is naive).

Example: (empty), +0000, -0400, +1030

This doesn't match the format of an RFC 3339 offset, and indeed if we try to use %z in the format string and parse an RFC 3339 date, we'll fail:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 500, in _strptime_datetime
    tt, fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 337, in _strptime
    (data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z' does not match format '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z'
>>> datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 500, in _strptime_datetime
    tt, fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 337, in _strptime
    (data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00' does not match format '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z'

(Actually, the above is just what you'll see in Python 3. In Python 2 we'll fail for an even simpler reason, which is that strptime does not implement the %z directive at all in Python 2.)

The multiple answers here that recommend strptime all work around this by including a literal Z in their format string, which matches the Z from the question asker's example datetime string (and discards it, producing a datetime object without a timezone):

>>> datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686)

Since this discards timezone information that was included in the original datetime string, it's questionable whether we should regard even this result as correct. But more importantly, because this approach involves hard-coding a particular UTC offset into the format string, it will choke the moment it tries to parse any RFC 3339 datetime with a different UTC offset:

>>> datetime.strptime("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 500, in _strptime_datetime
    tt, fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/_strptime.py", line 337, in _strptime
    (data_string, format))
ValueError: time data '2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686+05:00' does not match format '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ'

Unless you're certain that you only need to support RFC 3339 datetimes in Zulu time, and not ones with other timezone offsets, don't use strptime. Use one of the many other approaches described in answers here instead.