How to make python datetime.strptime take into account timezone passed?

Question

Trying to convert a string to datetime and save it to db. The string specifies the timezone, but strptime doesn't accept the %z option.

datetime.strptime("Tue Feb 14 2017 15:30:01 GMT-0500", "%a %b %d %Y %H:%M:%S GMT%z")

ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%a %b %d %Y %H:%M:%S GMT%z'

Answer 1

%z is supported since Python 3.2.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime("Tue Feb 14 2017 15:30:01 GMT-0500", "%a %b %d %Y %H:%M:%S GMT%z")
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 14, 15, 30, 1, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(-1, 68400)))

---

Or use dateutil.parser,

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse('Tue Feb 14 2017 15:30:01 GMT-0500')
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 14, 15, 30, 1, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 18000))

---