["python","datetime","datetime-parsing"]
Parsing time string in Python

I have a date time string that I don't know how to parse it in Python. The string is like this: Tue May 08 15:14:45 +0800 2012 I tried datetime.strptime("Tue May 08 15:14:45 +0800 2012","%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y") but Python raises 'z' is a bad directive in format '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y' According to Python doc: %z UTC offset in the form +HHMM or -HHMM (empty string if the the object is naive). What is the right format to parse this time string?
datetime.datetime.strptime has problems with timezone parsing. Have a look at the dateutil package: >>> from dateutil import parser >>> parser.parse("Tue May 08 15:14:45 +0800 2012") datetime.datetime(2012, 5, 8, 15, 14, 45, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 28800))