ValueError Parsing Time String

I have written this code to convert a unusual time into EPOCH: x = 'Mon Jul 25 19:04:30 GMT+01:00 2016' print(datetime.strptime(x, '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z%z %Y').strftime('%s')) How

Solution 1:

Your timezone format has an extra : inside which causes the format mismatching error, you can remove the last : from the string firstly and then parse it:

import re
from datetime import datetime
x1 = re.sub(r":(?=[^:]+$)", "", x)   # remove the last semi colon

datetime.strptime(x1, '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z%z %Y').strftime('%s')
# '1469487870'

Solution 2:

If you use dateutil instead of datetime.strptime it seems to work:

from dateutil import parser
parser.parse("Mon Jul 25 19:04:30 GMT+01:00 2016")
>> datetime.datetime(2016, 7, 25, 19, 4, 30, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -3600))