[Python] parse date string having "EDT"

When reporting that you get an error, please give the full error and
traceback.


My mind reading skills are telling me, though, that you're getting a
ValueError because you're trying to parse a timezone that is unknown to
the ?time.strptime? function. See its documentation for why
<URL:http://docs.python.org/library/time.html#time.strptime>.

Thanks,

My script should be platform independent, so I think filtering out time zone info is better.

Right, because strptime doesn't support %Z. You'll have to handle that
yourself and remove it before conversion.

Au contraire:

Support for the %Z directive is based on the values contained in
tzname and whether daylight is true. Because of this, it is
platform-specific except for recognizing UTC and GMT which are
always known (and are considered to be non-daylight savings timezones).

<URL:http://docs.python.org/library/time.html#time.strptime>

I do keep forgetting that Python's strptime does not just pass through to
the C library. C's strptime does not support %Z.

You might consider trying dateutil.parser.parse (http://labix.org/python-dateutil#head-c0e81a473b647dfa787dc11e8c69557ec2c3ecd2)