Why python 2.7 doesn"t include Z character (Zulu or zero offset) at the end of UTC datetime object"s isoformat string unlike JavaScript?
>>> datetime.datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
"2013-10-29T09:14:03.895210"
Whereas in javascript
>>> console.log(new Date().toISOString());
2013-10-29T09:38:41.341Z
isoformat()Python"s datetime does not support the military timezone suffixes like "Z" suffix for UTC. The following simple string replacement does the trick:
In [1]: import datetime
In [2]: d = datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 10, 12, 0, 0)
In [3]: str(d).replace("+00:00", "Z")
Out[3]: "2014-12-10 12:00:00Z"
str(d) is essentially the same as d.isoformat(sep=" ")
See: Datetime, Python Standard Library
strftime()Or you could use strftime to achieve the same effect:
In [4]: d.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
Out[4]: "2014-12-10 12:00:00Z"
Note: This option works only when you know the date specified is in UTC.
See: datetime.strftime()
Going further, you may be interested in displaying human readable timezone information, pytz with strftime %Z timezone flag:
In [5]: import pytz
In [6]: d = datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 10, 12, 0, 0, tzinfo=pytz.utc)
In [7]: d
Out[7]: datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 10, 12, 0, tzinfo=<UTC>)
In [8]: d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
Out[8]: "2014-12-10 12:00:00 UTC"