Question

I am trying to parse some timestamps in python. They look like this:

1334423456 +0200

where obviously the first part is a UNIX timestamp, and the second part the timezone offset in format “+HHMM”/”-HHMM”. I am trying to get this into a python.datetime object.

I can use the first part with datetime.fromtimestamp:

datetime.fromtimestamp(s.split()[0])

but I have no idea how to apply the second part (timezone offset) to it. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The easiest method is to use the iso8601 module; it includes an (internal) timezone parser that handles almost your format; we need to insert a : to follow make it match ISO 8601 timezones:

import iso8601
stamp, tz = s.split()
timezone = iso8601.iso8601.parse_timezone(tz[:3] + ':' + tz[3:])
dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(int(stamp)).astimezone(timezone)