Machinery for parsing/serializing datetimes

Author: Mike Kistler

requirements.txt

@@ -2,3 +2,4 @@ requests>=2.0,<3.0
 pysolr>=3.3,<4.0
 argparse>=1.3.0
 pyOpenSSL>=16.2.0
+python_dateutil >= 2.5.3

watson_developer_cloud/watson_service.py

@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@
 import requests
 import sys
 from requests.structures import CaseInsensitiveDict
+import dateutil.parser as date_parser
 
 try:
     from http.cookiejar import CookieJar  # Python 3
@@ -73,6 +74,23 @@ def __str__(self):
 class WatsonInvalidArgument(WatsonException):
     pass
 
+def datetime_to_string(datetime):
+    """
+    Serializes a datetime to a string.
+    :param datetime: datetime value
+    :return: string. containing iso8601 format date string
+    """
+    return datetime.isoformat().replace('+00:00', 'Z')
+
+
+def string_to_datetime(string):
+    """
+    Deserializes string to datetime.
+    :param string: string containing datetime in iso8601 format
+    :return: datetime.
+    """
+    return date_parser.parse(string)
+
 
 def _cleanup_param_value(value):
     if isinstance(value, bool):