strptime() doesn't recognize BST as a valid timezone

[Adam Monsen]

I'm unable to parse the following date string using time.strptime():
"Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:07 PM BST"

Format: "%a %b %d, %Y %I:%M %p %Z"

I tried changing the locale and using time.tzset(), but no luck. Is
there anyone in London (or some other BST location) that would try
running the following code?

import time
date_str = "Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:07 PM BST"
format = "%a %b %d, %Y %I:%M %p %Z"
time.strptime(date_str, format)

I get: "ValueError: time data did not match format: ..."

NOTE: there is a workable solution to getting this date into the proper
timezone ('Europe/London'), but I'm still unable to parse the 'BST'
part, even after setting the locale to en_GB.utf8 and the timezone to
'Europe/London'. Here's a solution to "zoning" naive date strings:
http://snipurl.com/hoqz (full url:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/ce4909280561458b/
).

I did notice that the Python docs mention %Z is deprecated, so
http://snipurl.com/hoqz is possibly the best solution available for
now.

Thoughts?

 

[Adam Monsen]

Ok, I've figured this out.

import os, time
date = '10 August 2005 at 17:26 BST'
format = '%d %B %Y at %H:%M %Z'
os.environ['TZ'] = 'Europe/London'
time.strptime(date, format)

(2005, 8, 10, 17, 26, 0, 2, 222, 1)

Works (unsuprisingly) as advertised at the bottom of this page:
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-time.html

And now I'm a little closer to understanding why.