Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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Parsing dates can become very complex. While our parse_iso8601 will work when interacting with most systems that serve a date in string format (such as JSON), you will quickly face cases where it falls short due to all the ways a datetime can be expressed.

For example, we might receive back a value such as 2 weeks ago or July 4, 2013 PST. Trying to parse all these cases is not very convenient and can get complicated pretty quickly. In case you have to handle these special cases, you should probably rely on an external package such as dateparser, dateutil, or moment.