On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 8:26 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

My guess is that the OP is parsing dates that have a numerical TZ offset (like most date formats found in internet protocols like http or email headers).

If datetime.strptime() does not satisfy OP needs already, I am +1 for improving it. We have an open issue for that already: < http://bugs.python.org/issue24954>.

But there's really no substitute for just calling

datetime(....., tzinfo=timezone(timedelta(hours=......)))

This is ugly, but hopefully you won't see this outside of timezone support library functions.