How do I parse an ISO 8601-formatted date?

I need to parse RFC 3339 strings like "2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z" into Python’s datetime type.

I have found strptime in the Python standard library, but it is not very convenient.

What is the best way to do this?

The datetime standard library has, since Python 3.7, a function for inverting datetime.isoformat().

classmethod datetime.fromisoformat(date_string):

Return a datetime corresponding to a date_string in one of the formats emitted by date.isoformat() and datetime.isoformat().

Specifically, this function supports strings in the format(s):

YYYY-MM-DD[*HH[:MM[:SS[.mmm[mmm]]]][+HH:MM[:SS[.ffffff]]]]

where * can match any single character.

Caution: This does not support parsing arbitrary ISO 860Best Answertrings – it is only intended as the inverse operation of datetime.isoformat().

Examples:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.fromisoformat('2011-11-04')
datetime.datetime(2011, 11, 4, 0, 0)

…

Be sure to read the caution from the docs!