Hello, it occured to me today that it's not currently possible to parse ISO 8601 dates using the datetime.datetime.strftime function (I was parsing datetimes generated by Postgres). The problem is in the semicolon in the time zone offset. '1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00' is a valid ISO 8601 date and time representation, the likes of which can be generated by the datetime module itself (the isoformat method). The %z strftime directive only recognizes offsets without the semicolon. The Python docs also direct users to inspect the platform strftime documentation; on my system the man page clearly states %z is "... The +hhmm or -hhmm numeric timezone", again, no semicolon support. Googling around, most common suggestions are to use a third party library (such as dateutil), so either this functionality really doesn't exist in a simple form in the datetime module, or is really undiscoverable. It seems to me ISO 8601 is significant enough (since there are even special methods for it in the datetime module) for it to be parsable, in a non-complex way, by the standard library. I guess it's interesting to point out a new flag was added to Java's SimpleDateFormat's date and time patterns in Java 7 - the X directive stands for "ISO 8601 time zone" (-08; -0800; -08:00, Z). I've worked with this so I happen to know it off the top of my head. Thanks in advance for comments. Tin