According to the documentation of datetime.strptime() https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior, technical note (4), %f accepts only 1 - 6 chars:

%f is an extension to the set of format characters in the C standard (but implemented separately in datetime objects, and therefore always available). When used with the strptime() method, the %f directive accepts from one to six digits and zero pads on the right.

I do NOT believe you have solved the problem correctly. You should not prefix the string with zero, but instead drop everything past 6 (which is less significant to contributing to time).

Something like this:

s='2014-11-19 00:00:00.0000000'
print (datetime.datetime.strptime((s[:26]).strip(), '%Y-%m-%d  %H:%M:%S.%f')).date()

Python 2.6 added a new strftime/strptime macro %f. The docs are a bit misleading as they only mention microseconds, but %f actually parses any decimal fraction of seconds with up to 6 digits, meaning it also works for milliseconds or even centiseconds or deciseconds.

time.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32.123', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S.%f')

However, time.struct_time doesn't actually store milliseconds/microseconds. You're better off using datetime, like this:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> a = datetime.strptime('30/03/09 16:31:32.123', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S.%f')
>>> a.microsecond
123000

As you can see, .123 is correctly interpreted as 123 000 microseconds.

The simplest way would be to use slicing to just chop off the last three digits of the microseconds:

def format_time():
    t = datetime.datetime.now()
    s = t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    return s[:-3]

I strongly recommend just chopping. I once wrote some logging code that rounded the timestamps rather than chopping, and I found it actually kind of confusing when the rounding changed the last digit. There was timed code that stopped running at a certain timestamp yet there were log events with that timestamp due to the rounding. Simpler and more predictable to just chop.

If you want to actually round the number rather than just chopping, it's a little more work but not horrible:

def format_time():
    t = datetime.datetime.now()
    s = t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    head = s[:-7] # everything up to the '.'
    tail = s[-7:] # the '.' and the 6 digits after it
    f = float(tail)
    temp = "{:.03f}".format(f)  # for Python 2.x: temp = "%.3f" % f
    new_tail = temp[1:] # temp[0] is always '0'; get rid of it
    return head + new_tail

Obviously you can simplify the above with fewer variables; I just wanted it to be very easy to follow.

How about convert like this:

dt = datetime.strptime(s[:-len('2-04:00')], '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f')
# datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 22, 13, 57, 31, 231189)

https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior

Suddenly found a useful method at django:

from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
dt = parse_datetime('2016-09-22T13:57:31.2311892-04:00')
# datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 22, 13, 57, 31, 231189, tzinfo=<django.utils.timezone.FixedOffset object at 0x7f20184f8390>)

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/utils/#module-django.utils.dateparse

Another pythonic format (use maya https://github.com/kennethreitz/maya):

# pip install maya
import maya
maya.parse('2016-09-22T13:57:31.2311892-04:00').datetime()
# datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 22, 17, 57, 31, 231189, tzinfo=<UTC>)

To get a date string with milliseconds, use [:-3] to trim the last three digits of %f (microseconds):

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')[:-3]
'2022-09-24 10:18:32.926'

Or shorter:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.utcnow().strftime('%F %T.%f')[:-3]
'2022-09-24 10:18:32.926'

See the Python docs for more "%" format codes and the strftime(3) man page for the full list.

In Python 3 this can be done in 2 steps:

1. Convert timestring to datetime object
2. Multiply the timestamp of the datetime object by 1000 to convert it to milliseconds.

For example like this:

from datetime import datetime

dt_obj = datetime.strptime('20.12.2016 09:38:42,76',
                           '%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S,%f')
millisec = dt_obj.timestamp() * 1000

print(millisec)

Output:

1482223122760.0

strptime accepts your timestring and a format string as input. The timestring (first argument) specifies what you actually want to convert to a datetime object. The format string (second argument) specifies the actual format of the string that you have passed.

Here is the explanation of the format specifiers from the official documentation:

• %d - Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %m - Month as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %Y - Year with century as a decimal number
• %H - Hour (24-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %M - Minute as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %S - Second as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %f - Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded to 6 digits.

Using dparser:

import dateutil.parser as dparser
dt_1 = '2019-02-16T10:41:20.6080000+01:00'
print("Datetime: {}".format(dparser.parse(dt_1,fuzzy=True)))

OUTPUT:

Datetime: 2019-02-16 10:41:20.608000+01:00

If you want the date component:

print("Date: {}".format(dparser.parse(dt_1,fuzzy=True).date()))

OUTPUT:

Date: 2019-02-16

If you don't need the precision, just chop it off.

d = "2020-09-16T10:02:38.5904496Z"
datetime.datetime.strptime(d.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")

Output: datetime.datetime(2020, 9, 16, 10, 2, 38)

If you want to keep it thou.

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(d[:-2], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f")
>>> datetime.datetime(2020, 9, 16, 10, 2, 38, 590449)