How do i check if timezone is present in a unicode string using Python

Question

I am having timestamp fields in my JSON data where some of the timestamps have timestamp in this format str("2014-05-12 00:00:00") and another in this format str("2015-01-20 08:28:16 UTC") . I would like to get year, month, day fields only from the string. I have tried the following approach but not sure what is the problem. Can someone please correct me. I have searched some of the answers from StackOverflow but nothing helped me.

from datetime import datetime
date_posted=str("2014-05-12 00:00:00")
date_posted_zone=str("2015-01-20 08:28:16 UTC")

def convert_timestamp(date_timestamp=None):
    if '%Z' in date_timestamp:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
    else:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    return d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

print convert_timestamp(date_posted_zone)

Answer 1

You're checking if the literal string %Z is in the timestamp value; only strptime (and strftime ) can actually make use of the format character.

What you can do is simply try to parse the string as if it had a timezone, and if that fails, try to parse it without.

def convert_timestamp(date_timestamp=None):
    try:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
    except ValueError:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    return d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

Of course, as written, you don't really need to parse the string at all; just split it on whitespace and return the first component. (Your existing code already assumes that the year/month/date matches.)

def convert_timestamp(date_timestamp):
    return date_timestamp.split()[0]

Answer 2

I've tried following code to search timezone in str and its working.

from datetime import datetime
date_posted=str("2014-05-12 00:00:00")
date_posted_zone=str("2015-01-20 08:28:16 UTC")
zone=date_posted_zone.split(" ")
print(zone[2])
def convert_timestamp(date_timestamp=None):
    if zone[2] in date_timestamp:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
    else:
        d = datetime.strptime(date_timestamp, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    return d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

print convert_timestamp(date_posted_zone)

Answer 3

from dateutil import parser

datetime_no_timezone = parser.parse("2015-01-20 08:28:16")
datetime_with_timezone = parser.parse("2015-01-20 08:28:16+02:00")

if datetime_no_timezone.tz == None:
    # CODE ALWAYS GO THROUGH THIS
    pass

if datetime_no_timezone.tz:
    # CODE ALWAYS GO THROUGH THIS
    pass