title: Python parse date format, ignore parts of string
body: <p>I want' to parse dates in this format, but ignore parts of the string. 'Wed, 27 Oct 1770 22:17:00 GMT' From what I have gathered, datetime does not support time zones very well. Which is fine, I really just want to ignore the timezone part of the string, without having to do string manipulation on it. Is there something I can replace %Z with below to say "any string here" and parse dates as such? Also, I don't understand why it will parse timezones like PST, GMT but not EST. It doesn't seem to attach tzinfo in any case anyways, not sure what types of string its really looking for the %Z portion.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import datetime
  &gt;&gt;&gt; y = datetime.datetime.strptime('Wed, 27 Oct 1770 22:17:00 GMT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; y = datetime.datetime.strptime('Wed, 27 Oct 1770 22:17:00 PST', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; y = datetime.datetime.strptime('Wed, 27 Oct 1770 22:17:00 EST', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
    File "/opt/brazil-pkg-cache/packages/Python/Python-2.5.1.17.1/RHEL5_64/DEV.STD.PTHREAD/build/lib/python2.5/_strptime.py", line 331, in strptime
      (data_string, format))
  ValueError: time data did not match format:  data=Wed, 27 Oct 1770 22:17:00 EST  fmt=%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note: dateutil is not an option for me, I want to support numerous formats and can't allow dateutil to accidentally interpret dates wrong. (i.e. dateutil seems to take a guess when it sees dates like 01/02/2010, Feb 1? or Jan 2?). I basically want to just try accepting formats I specify in an order until I get a match.</p>