Parsing ISO date/time strings - where did the parser go?

[John Nagle]

In Python 2.7:

   I want to parse standard ISO date/time strings such as

	2012-09-09T18:00:00-07:00

into Python "datetime" objects.  The "datetime" object offers
an output method , datetimeobj.isoformat(), but not an input
parser.  There ought to be

	classmethod datetime.fromisoformat(s)

but there isn't.  I'd like to avoid adding a dependency on
a third party module like "dateutil".

The "Working with time" section of the Python wiki is so
ancient it predates "datetime", and says so.

There's an iso8601 module on PyPi, but it's abandoned; it hasn't been
updated since 2007 and has many outstanding issues.

There are mentions of "xml.utils.iso8601.parse" in
various places, but the "xml" module that comes
with Python 2.7 doesn't have xml.utils.

http://www.seehuhn.de/pages/pdate
says:

"Unfortunately there is no easy way to parse full ISO 8601 dates using
the Python standard library."

It looks like this was taken out of "xml" at some point,
but not moved into "datetime".

				John Nagle