Timezone and ISO8601 struggles with datetime and xml.utils.iso8601.parse

[Samuel]

Hello,

I am trying to convert a local time into UTC ISO8601, then parse it
back into local time. I tried the following:

----------------------
#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import datetime
import xml.utils.iso8601

year   = 2005
month  = 7
day    = 22
hour   = 10   # This is localtime
minute = 30

mydatetime = datetime.datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute)
strtime    = mydatetime.isoformat()

print "Time: " + strtime  # Localtime too
mytimestamp = xml.utils.iso8601.parse(strtime)
----------------------

How can I convert this into UTC? Commonsense would have me guess that
the date is converted into UTC on construction of the datetime object,
hovever, this doesn't seem to be the case. I also found the
astimezone(tz) method, but where can I obtain the concrete tz object?

The second problem has to do with the ISO8601 parser, which raises the
following error:

----------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./timetest.py", line 16, in ?
    mytimestamp = xml.utils.iso8601.parse(strtime)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/_xmlplus/utils/iso8601.py",
line 22, in parse
    raise ValueError, "unknown or illegal ISO-8601 date format: " + `s`
ValueError: unknown or illegal ISO-8601 date format:
'2005-07-22T10:30:00'
----------------------

Why does it fail to parse the value returned by the datetime object,
and how can I create a parseable time from the datetime object?

Thanks,
-Samuel