converting ISO8601 date and time string representations to datetime

[Wolfgang Maier]

Hi,
I'm trying to convert ISO8601-compliant strings representing dates or 
dates and times into datetime.datetime objects.
I tried using the strptime method, but the problem here is that I can 
only specify one format argument, which can be used to parse either a 
full date/time string or just a date string, but not both.

While I could just try parsing with one format, then catch the 
ValueError in case it fails and try another format, it feels like there 
should be a more elegant way to do this.

I do know about the dateutil package, but I'd prefer to stick to the 
stdlib for this.

Any suggestions ?

Wolfgang