I have a Django app with a model that contains a field of type DateTimeField.
I am pulling data from the web in the format of 2008-04-10 11:47:58-05 .
I believe that the last 3 characters in this example are the timezone.
How can I preserve that data in the DateTimeField, and is there an easy conversion between the two? Setting the DateTimeField to simply contain a string of the above format throws a ValidationError.

Thank you!

You can also use Django's implementation . I would in fact prefer it and only use something else, if Django's parser cannot handle the format.

For example:

>>> from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0)
>>> parse_datetime('2016-10-03T19:00:00+0200')
datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 3, 19, 0, tzinfo=<django.utils.timezone.FixedOffset object at 0x8072546d8>)
To have it converted to the right timezone when none is known, use make_aware from django.utils.timezone.
So ultimately, your parser utility would be:
from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime
from django.utils.timezone import is_aware, make_aware
def get_aware_datetime(date_str):
    ret = parse_datetime(date_str)
    if not is_aware(ret):
        ret = make_aware(ret)
    return ret
        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8636760/parsing-a-datetime-string-into-a-django-datetimefield/24228410#24228410
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                I sure wish the docs specified exactly what a 'well formatted' date is, though! I would expect that to mean RFC 1123, but it doesn't seem to like what my browser is sending back...
– Michael Scheper
                Nov 18 '14 at 11:21
                This answer is not correct in that a timezone aware datetime is not returned, at least not in 1.8.4. You can try this for yourself from django.utils import timezone, dateparse;  timezone.is_aware(dateparse.parse_datetime('2015-09-04 19:22:17')) and also see in the source that a datetime.datetime is returned.
– Jmills
                Aug 27 '15 at 15:49
                @TheCardCheat You're right that it doesn't make_aware() (github tells me it never did and yet code I used became aware somewhere). But, if an input string contains a timezone offset that is recognized then it does return an aware datetime.
– Melvyn
                Sep 23 '16 at 12:51
from django.utils.timezone import get_current_timezone
from datetime import datetime
tz = get_current_timezone()
dt = tz.localize(datetime.strptime(str_date, '%m/%d/%Y'))
        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8636760/parsing-a-datetime-string-into-a-django-datetimefield/24740289#24740289
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If you're using Django Forms, you can specify input_formats to your DateField. See the DateField documentation
If you are wanting to parse arbitrary date information, you could use something like parsedatetime and implement a method that Django calls to do the parsing before it hits the validators. (See this SO answer for a good summary of how validations work and when to insert them)
        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8636760/parsing-a-datetime-string-into-a-django-datetimefield/8636882#8636882
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String format of Django DateTimeField is "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ".
Hence, conversion  between eachother can be done  using strptime() or strptime() using this format. 
eg. for string formatted value  (2016-10-03T19:00:00.999Z), it can be converted
to Django datetime object as : 
from datetime import datetime
datetime_str = '2016-10-03T19:00:00.999Z'
datetime_object = datetime.strptime(datetime_str, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")
        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8636760/parsing-a-datetime-string-into-a-django-datetimefield/55243535#55243535
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