gistfile1.py

def parse_8601(timestr):
    """Parse an ISO-8601 timestamp.

    :param timestr: String containing an ISO-8601 timestamp.
    :returns: Python :class:`~datetime.datetime` instance.

    This only parses a common subset of the standard, but Python's
    standard library (as of 2.5, at least) does not have a suitable
    parser and we may not want to depend on thrid-party libraries
    everywhere this is used.
    """
    # Do something here...