For those who don’t know what the ISO 8601 format is, you can read about it here.
To create an ISO 8601 timestamp in Python, do:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> timestamp = datetime.utcnow().isoformat() + 'Z'
'2014-04-01T15:11:18.195125Z'
The ‘ Z ’ added to the timestamp indicates that the timezone is UTC.
To parse a ISO 8601 timestamp and generate a datetime object, do:
>>> import dateutil.parser as dp
>>> a = dp.parse(timestamp)
>>> a
datetime.datetime(2014, 4, 1, 15, 11, 46, 113800, tzinfo=tzutc())
Alternatively, you could also generate the object using:
>>> datetime.strptime(timestamp, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ')
datetime.datetime(2014, 4, 1, 15, 11, 46, 113800)