Python3.6 module datetime.strptime didn't have directive to convert date values having Era designator (AD or BC) and time zone (Ex: EST, PST, -07:00)

Below are few example for date values which are not supported

2018-04-14 12:08:56 EST

2018-05-23 11:03:43 PST

2017-12-24 AD 12:08:56

2018-05-23 11:03:43 +05:30

Thanks for the report Raghunath. Regarding timezone detection there is a limitation with %Z supporting only UTC, GMT and `time.tzname` which is not documented and it's an open issue tracked at issue22377 . Regarding a directive to determine Era I think it falls under a feature request and compile error is used for errors during compiling python interpreter itself. So I am changing this from compile error to enhancement.

# Support for GMT, UTC and error on PDT

$ ./python.exe
Python 3.8.0a0 (heads/master:f6c8007a29, Sep 25 2018, 12:30:43)
[Clang 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.81)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2018-06-14 10:10:11 GMT", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 14, 10, 10, 11)
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2018-06-14 10:10:11 UTC", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 14, 10, 10, 11)
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2018-06-14 10:10:11 PDT", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/karthikeyansingaravelan/stuff/python/cpython/Lib/_strptime.py", line 568, in _strptime_datetime
    tt, fraction, gmtoff_fraction = _strptime(data_string, format)
  File "/Users/karthikeyansingaravelan/stuff/python/cpython/Lib/_strptime.py", line 349, in _strptime
    raise ValueError("time data %r does not match format %r" %
ValueError: time data '2018-06-14 10:10:11 PDT' does not match format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z'

Hope this helps!

Thanks

Since the Python datetime only supports dates within 0001-01-01 through 9999-12-31 range, it is not clear how we can meaningfully support the AD/BC era designation.

Looking at man strftime page on my Mac, I see that they use every upper an lower case letter as a valid format specifier, but they still not have a letter code for AD/BC.  In the "BUGS" section they humorousely complain that "There is no conversion specification for the phase of the moon" which makes me think that the moon phase designations are higher on some people agenda than the era designations.