title: How to preserve timezone when parsing date/time strings with strptime()?
body: <p>I have a CSV dumpfile from a Blackberry IPD backup, created using IPDDump.
  The date/time strings in here look something like this
  (where <code>EST</code> is an Australian time-zone):</p>
  <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010
  </code></pre>
  <p>I need to be able to parse this date in Python. At first, I tried to use the <code>strptime()</code> function from datettime.</p>
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; datetime.datetime.strptime('Tue Jun 22 12:10:20 2010 EST', '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %Z')
  </code></pre>
  <p>However, for some reason, the <code>datetime</code> object that comes back doesn't seem to have any <code>tzinfo</code> associated with it.</p>
  <p>I did read on <a href="http://www.enricozini.org/2009/debian/using-python-datetime/" rel="noreferrer">this page</a> that apparently <code>datetime.strptime</code> silently discards <code>tzinfo</code>, however, I checked the documentation, and I can't find anything to that effect documented <a href="http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html" rel="noreferrer">here</a>.</p>
  <p>Is there any way to get <code>strptime()</code> to play nicely with timezones?</p>