# Issues with datetime and UTC offset

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616>\
**Category:** Ansible Developer\
**Created:** [April 7, 2020, 8:37am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616 "2020-04-07T08:37:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Tony\_Hogsten](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Tony\_Hogsten](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Tony_Hogsten)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2020, 8:37am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616/1 "2020-04-07T08:37:25Z")

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Hi!

I have a date that I get from some source (I cannot change the source data), that looks like this: **“Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:16:10 +0000”.** So I need to convert it to another datetime format.

The approach I took was I attempted to make it to datetime, but it doesn’t seem possible.

`"{{ item.last_report_time | to_datetime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +%z') | default(omit) }}"`

If I do this I get the error:

**and could not be converted to an dict.The error was: ‘z’ is a bad directive in format ‘%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +%z’**

If I omit the z i get the following error:

**to\_datetime(‘%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S’) }}"}), and could not be converted to an dict.The error was: unconverted data remains: +0000**

i’m also looping the results I get from an earlier step, so I am a bit hindered in my possibility of running a block of code to change the datetime. As far as I understand it, it needs to be done within the loop itself.

`body_dict: agentVersion: "{{ item.agent_version }}" agentType: "{{ item.agent_type }}" lastReportTime: "{{ item.last_report_time | to_datetime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +%z') | default(omit) }}" with_items: "{{ result.output }}"`

Any ideas?

Best regards,  
Tony

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Florian\_Apolloner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dfb087/32.png) [@Florian\_Apolloner](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Florian_Apolloner)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2020, 5:21pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616/2 "2020-04-07T17:21:01Z")

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to\_datetime directly calls into strptime. That said I’d just drop the +, %z should include that already: [https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-format-codes](https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-format-codes)

If you still get an error then, something is wonky.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Tony\_Hogsten](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Tony\_Hogsten](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Tony_Hogsten)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 12:51pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616/3 "2020-04-08T12:51:39Z")

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Hi,

I’ve tried with and without the ‘+’. It complains on the z specifically.

I get the exact same error as I wrote before.

//Tony

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Florian\_Apolloner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dfb087/32.png) [@Florian\_Apolloner](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Florian_Apolloner)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2020, 9:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616/4 "2020-04-12T21:11:43Z")

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I get that error on Python 2, but Python 3 works fine. Given that Python 2 is EOL you probably want to update to Python 3.

py3:  
In [22]: datetime.datetime.strptime(‘Sun, 12 Apr 2020 23:04:52 +0000’, ‘%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z’)  
Out[22]: datetime.datetime(2020, 4, 12, 23, 4, 52, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

py2:

> > > datetime.datetime.strptime(‘Sun, 12 Apr 2020 23:04:52 +0000’, ‘%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z’)  
> > > Traceback (most recent call last):  
> > > File “”, line 1, in   
> > > File “/usr/lib64/python2.7/\_strptime.py”, line 324, in \_strptime  
> > > (bad\_directive, format))  
> > > ValueError: ‘z’ is a bad directive in format ‘%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z’

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Tony\_Hogsten](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Tony\_Hogsten](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Tony_Hogsten)\
**Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 12:31pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/issues-with-datetime-and-utc-offset/32616/5 "2020-04-22T12:31:08Z")

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Yes! Seems to work with Python3. Thanks.

// Tony