Question

Here’s an example of how the Facebook Graph API is returning date strings for me:

2011-03-06T03:36:45+0000

how would I parse this into a python datetime class? I’m aware of the datetime.strptime function, which takes in a second parameter that contains some googly-eyed format string, but don’t know which letters and dashes to include.

Answer 1

Here it is with time & strptime:

>>> time.strptime('2011-03-06T03:36:45+0000', '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+0000')
time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=3, tm_min=36, tm_sec=45, tm_wday=6, tm_yday=65, tm_isdst=-1)

or with datetime:

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('2011-03-06T03:36:45+0000','%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+0000')

As you see it returns the time_struct with the fields correctly filled out.

Here is a translation of the format:

• %Y = year with century (2011)
• %m = month w/ leading zero
• %d = day w/ leading zero
• %H = hour w/ leading zero, 24-hour clock
• %M = minute
• %S = second
• T, -, and : are used as delimiters, and included as literal strings
• +0000 is again included as a literal string