Django: How-to convert naive datetime when time zone support is active?

Question

I'm struggeling with Django and datetime.

I have a datetime-string as this "Sun, 28 Aug 2016 11:42:00 +0200" - so from my point of view including timezone information "+0200"

Then I convert it using this:

date_published = time.strptime(date_published, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")

It gives me this:

time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=11, tm_min=42, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=6, tm_yday=241, tm_isdst=-1)

Then I try to convert it like this:

date_published = datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(date_published))

Which gives me:

2016-08-28 11:42:00

And then Django complains when saving it with the following warning:

RuntimeWarning: DateTimeField ModelName.field_name received a naive
datetime (2012-01-01 00:00:00) while time zone support is active.

How do I correctly convert the input string so that I can save it into a timezone aware datetime-model's fields?

Best Regeards

Kev

Answer 1

This alone should work:

from datetime import datetime
date_published = datetime.strptime(date_published, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")

The return I get is datetime.datetime(2016, 8, 28, 11, 42, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0, 7200)))

Answer 2

Python itself can't handle timezones. You need external library to do it. For example dateutil:

from dateutil.parser import parse
dt = parse("Sun, 28 Aug 2016 11:42:00 +0200")