[SOLVED] [datetime.strptime] ValueError: time data 'foo' does not match format 'bar'

[Winfried]

Hello,

The following code works in other scripts that read an RSS feed, but for some reason, this one doesn't work with another site.

As shown, I tried .split() in case it had a carriage return, but it makes no difference:

URL="https://feeds.acme.com/blah.xml"
resp = requests.get(URL)
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text,'xml')
for item in soup("item"):
	title=item.title.string
	link=item.link.string

	#<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:44:18 GMT</pubDate>
	#ValueError: time data 'Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:44:18 GMT' does not match format '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z'
	date_obj = dt.datetime.strptime(item.pubDate.string, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")

	#NO DIFF date = item.pubDate.string.strip()
	#date_obj = dt.datetime.strptime(date, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")

	pubDate = "{} {} {}".format(date_obj.day,date_obj.strftime("%b"),date_obj.year)

Any idea what could be wrong?

Thank you.

--
Edit: Found it here: "don't confuse %Z (timezone abbr) and %z (numeric offset)"

This works:

date_obj = dt.datetime.strptime(item.pubDate.string, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")

[lyly19]

It seems like the format of the pubDate string might be slightly different from what you expect. The error indicates that the time string 'Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:44:18 GMT' doesn't match the strptime format "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z", possibly because of the GMT part not being recognized as a timezone offset. Try updating the format string to handle GMT or removing it before parsing:

date_str = item.pubDate.string.replace('GMT', '').strip()
date_obj = dt.datetime.strptime(date_str, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")

This should parse the date correctly.

buran write Jan-02-2025, 04:13 AM:
Spam link removed