Sorting a List of Dictionaries by Date Strings in ISO Format - implementing Timezone Handling
I'm maintaining legacy code that I'm trying to debug I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock... I'm stuck trying to After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm currently trying to sort a list of dictionaries in Python, where each dictionary contains a date string in ISO format (e.g., '2023-10-05T14:30:00Z'). The scenario I'm working with is that some of these dates have timezone offsets, while others are in UTC. When I attempt to sort the list, the dates with different timezone representations seem to be ordered incorrectly. Here's what I've tried so far: ```python from datetime import datetime # Sample list of dictionaries data = [ {'event': 'A', 'date': '2023-10-05T14:30:00+01:00'}, {'event': 'B', 'date': '2023-10-05T13:30:00Z'}, {'event': 'C', 'date': '2023-10-05T15:30:00+02:00'}, {'event': 'D', 'date': '2023-10-05T12:30:00Z'} ] # Attempt to sort by date sorted_data = sorted(data, key=lambda x: datetime.fromisoformat(x['date'])) ``` However, when I run this, I get the following output: ``` ValueError: invalid isoformat string: '2023-10-05T14:30:00+01:00' ``` I realized that `datetime.fromisoformat()` does not handle the 'Z' timezone indicator correctly. I also considered using `dateutil.parser.isoparse`, but I am not sure about the performance implications compared to the built-in methods. What’s the best way to sort this list while properly handling the different timezone formats? Should I convert all dates to UTC first, or is there a more efficient approach? Any guidance on best practices for dealing with datetime sorting in Python would be greatly appreciated! My Python version is 3.9. This is part of a larger application I'm building. I'm working on a web app that needs to handle this. What am I doing wrong? How would you solve this? The stack includes Python and several other technologies. This is happening in both development and production on Debian. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Python. Could this be a known issue?