Parse ISO 8601 date ending in Z with Python

The ‘Z’ at the end of an ISO 8601 date indicates that the time is in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). To parse a string containing a date in that format with a ‘Z’ at the end we can use the datetime module. e.g.

from datetime import datetime

iso_date_string = "2023-05-29T10:30:00Z"
parsed_date = datetime.fromisoformat(iso_date_string[:-1])  # Removing the 'Z' at the end

print(parsed_date)

However, when comparing to a time-zoned datetime e.g. datetime.now(pytz.timezone('Europe/London')) we get the following error TypeError: can't compare offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes.

We need to make the parsed datetime object timezone aware, to set it to UTC we can do the following

from datetime import datetime
import pytz

iso_date_string = "2023-05-29T10:30:00Z"
parsed_date = datetime.fromisoformat(iso_date_string[:-1])  # Removing the 'Z' at the end

utc_timezone = pytz.timezone('UTC')
aware_date = parsed_date.replace(tzinfo=utc_timezone)

print(aware_date)
tags development