Question: I am trying to scrape and sort articles with a body, headline, and date column. However, when pulling the date, I’m running into an error with the time zone:

```
ValueError: time data 'Jun 1, 2022 2:49PM EDT' does not match format '%b %d, %Y %H:%M%p %z'

```

My code is as follows:

```
def get_info(url):
    headers={'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36'}
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text)
    news = soup.find('div', attrs={'class': 'body__content'}).text
    headline = soup.find('h1').text
    date = datetime.datetime.strptime(soup.find('time').text, "%b %d, %Y %H:%M%p %z")
    columns = [news, headline, date]
    column_names = ['News','Headline','Date']
    return dict(zip(column_names, columns))

```

Is there a way to grab the time zone in a similar method or just drop it overall?

Answer: 
Note %z in strptime() is for timezone offsets not names and %Z only accepts certain values for time zones. For details see [API docs](https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior).

Simplest option is to use [dateparser](https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/parser.html) module to parse dates with time zone names (e.g. EDT).

```python
import dateparser

s = "Jun 1, 2022 2:49PM EDT"
d =  dateparser.parse(s)
print(d)

```

**Output:**

```
2022-06-01 14:49:00-04:00

```

Many of the date modules (e.g. [dateutil](https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and [pytz](https://pypi.org/project/pytz/)) have timezone offsets defined for "EST", "PST", etc. but "EDT" is less common. These modules would need you to define the timezone with the offset as UTC-04:00.

```python
import dateutil.parser

s = "Jun 1, 2022 2:49PM EDT"
tzinfos = {"EDT": -14400}
d = dateutil.parser.parse(s, tzinfos=tzinfos)
print(d)

```

**Output:**

```
2022-06-01 14:49:00-04:00

```
As alternate to @CodeMonkey solution, you may also try it by pandas :

```
pd.to_datetime('Jun 1, 2022 2:49PM EDT').tz_localize('US/Eastern')

```