What exactly does the T and Z mean in timestamp?
Question:
I have this timestamp value being return by a web service "2014-09-12T19:34:29Z"
I know that it means timezone, but what exactly does it mean?
And I am trying to mock this web service, so is there a way to generate this timestamp using strftime in python?
Sorry if this is painfully obvious, but Google was not very helpful and neither was the strftime() reference page.
I am currently using this :
x.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z")
'2015-03-26T10:58:51'
Answers:
The T doesn’t really stand for anything. It is just the separator that the ISO 8601 combined date-time format requires. You can read it as an abbreviation for Time.
The Z stands for the Zero timezone, as it is offset by 0 from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Both characters are just static letters in the format, which is why they are not documented by the datetime.strftime() method. You could have used Q or M or Monty Python and the method would have returned them unchanged as well; the method only looks for patterns starting with % to replace those with information from the datetime object.
I have this timestamp value being return by a web service "2014-09-12T19:34:29Z"
I know that it means timezone, but what exactly does it mean?
And I am trying to mock this web service, so is there a way to generate this timestamp using strftime in python?
Sorry if this is painfully obvious, but Google was not very helpful and neither was the strftime() reference page.
I am currently using this :
x.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z")
'2015-03-26T10:58:51'
The T doesn’t really stand for anything. It is just the separator that the ISO 8601 combined date-time format requires. You can read it as an abbreviation for Time.
The Z stands for the Zero timezone, as it is offset by 0 from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Both characters are just static letters in the format, which is why they are not documented by the datetime.strftime() method. You could have used Q or M or Monty Python and the method would have returned them unchanged as well; the method only looks for patterns starting with % to replace those with information from the datetime object.