How to transfer unicode to datetime in python?

Question

I dumps a datetime object into to json object and I get:

a = u'2015-02-17T15:06:23.869000'

How to transfer it back to a datetime object?

Answer 1

You can use the following code:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(u"2015-02-17T15:06:23.869000", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f")
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 17, 15, 6, 23, 869000)

to parse it back to a datetime object. JSON has no special representation for a datetime object, so your program encodes it as a string.

Answer 2

One option is to let dateutil do the job:

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> a = u'2015-02-17T15:06:23.869000' 
>>> parser.parse(a)
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 17, 15, 6, 23, 869000)

you could also look for some reference here Convert unicode to datetime proper strptime format