The problem

The JSON standard RFC 4627 does not support datetime types. These are usually represented as strings and Python decoders end up decoding them as such. Consider the following example:

import simplejson as json

>>> test = '{"name": "John Doe", "born": "Thu, 1 Mar 2012 10:00:49 UTC"}'
>>> json.loads(test)
{'born': u'Thu, 1 Mar 2012 10:00:49 UTC', 'name': u'John Doe'}

As you can see, in the resulting dictionary born is still a string.

The solution

JSON-datetime is a very simple wrapper around Python simplejson loads method. It decodes datetime values contained in JSON strings:

import jsondatetime as json

>>> test = '{"name": "John Doe", "born": "Thu, 1 Mar 2012 10:00:49 UTC"}'
>>> json.loads(test)
{'name': 'John Doe', 'born': datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 1, 10, 0 ,49)}

Strings are parsed using dateutil.parser.parse which is fairly flexible for common datetime formats

Custom parsing

Being just a wrapper around the loads method, you can still use all the standard loads arguments, object_hook included. This means that you can still perform custom parsing of your inbound JSON stream.

Installation

pip install json-datetime