PySO8601 aims to be a better Python module to parse ISO 8601 dates. It is inspired by the iso8601 currently available in the pypi repository, however this module is designed to accept any valid ISO8601 formatted string:

• Date including Week Dates (eg. 2011-W12-6) and Ordinal Dates (eg. 2012-003)
• Time including Time zone designations
• Combined Date & Time
• Durations
• Intervals

Truncated representations (YYYYMM, YYMMDD, hhmmss, etc) are also accepted.

import PySO8601
spam = PySO8601.parse('2011-01-01T14:32')
print spam # prints: 2011-01-01 14:32:00
eggs = PySO8601.parse('2010W052') # Week 5, day 2
print eggs # prints: 2010-02-01 00:00:00

For full examples on usage please review the specs in the source.

Python 3:

PySO8601 is now compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, and >= 3.3.

Durations:

parse_duration, when only provided a duration string, will assume 365 days in a year and 30 days in a month, due to the difficult nature of working with calendars. However, passing a start or end timestamp will provide the correct calculation based on that date.