Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Due to all the variants ISO 8601 allows, there is no easy way to throw it to datetime.datetime.strptime and get back a datetime for all case; we must coalesce all possible formats to a single one and then parse that one:

import datetime

def parse_iso8601(strdate):
    date, time = strdate.split('T', 1)
    if '-' in time:
        time, tz = time.split('-')
        tz = '-' + tz
    elif '+' in time:
        time, tz = time.split('+')
        tz = '+' + tz
    elif 'Z' in time:
        time = time[:-1]
        tz = '+0000'
    date = date.replace('-', '')
    time = time.replace(':', '')
    tz = tz.replace(':', '')
    return datetime.datetime.strptime('{}T{}{}'.format(date, time, tz), 
                                      "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z")

2. The previous implementation of parse_iso8601 copes with most possible ...