I have date as

In [1]: a = "Sun 10 May 2015 13:34:36 -0700"

When I try to convert it using strptime, its giving error.

In [3]: datetime.strptime(a, "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z"...: )
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-973ef1c6daca> in <module>()
----> 1 datetime.strptime(a, "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z"2 )
/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.pyc in _strptime(data_string, format)323     if not found:324         raise ValueError("time data %r does not match format %r" %
--> 325                          (data_string, format))326     if len(data_string) != found.end():327         raise ValueError("unconverted data remains: %s" %
ValueError: time data 'Sun 10 May 2015 13:34:36 -0700' does not match format '%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z'
In [6]: datetime.strptime(a, "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-6-e4870e34edda> in <module>()
----> 1 datetime.strptime(a, "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")
/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.pyc in _strptime(data_string, format)315                 del err316                 raise ValueError("'%s' is a bad directive in format '%s'" %
--> 317                                     (bad_directive, format))318             # IndexError only occurs when the format string is "%"319             except IndexError:
ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z'

As per doc, correct format is %z, but I might missing some part.

From the link you provided for the python doc, I found that you are using Python 2.7

It looks as if strptime doesn't always support %z. Python appears to just call the C function, and strptime doesn't support %z on your platform.

Note: from Python 3.2 onwards it will always work.

I am using Python 3.4 in which it is working fine

>>> a = "Sun 10 May 2015 13:34:36 -0700"
>>> datetime.strptime(a, "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")

Update using dateutil

$ pip install python-dateutilfrom dateutil import parser
parsed_date = parser.parse(date)>>> parsed_date
datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 14, 18, 43, 19)