Creating a datetime object from a string

This recipe demonstrates the conversion of well-formatted strings into datetime objects. This finds application in reading timestamps from a file. Also, this is helpful while receiving timestamps as JSON data over web APIs.

How to do it…

Execute the following steps for this recipe:

1. Import the necessary modules from the Python standard library:

>>> from datetime import datetime

2. Create a string representation of timestamp with date, time, and time zone. Assign it to now_str:

>>> now_str = '13-1-2021 15:53:39 +05:30'

3. Convert now_str to now, a datetime.datetime object. Print it:

>>> now = datetime.strptime(now_str, "%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S %z")
>>> print(now)

We get the following output:

2021-01-13 15:53:39+05:30

4. Confirm that now is of the datetime type:

>>> print(type(now))

We get the following output:

<class 'datetime.datetime'>

How it works...

In step 1, you...