import pytz import dateutil.parser TZINFOS = { 'PDT': pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'), # ... add more to handle other timezones # (I wish pytz had a list of common abbreviations) } datestring = '11:45:00 Aug 13, 2008 PDT' # Parse the string using dateutil datetime_in_pdt = dateutil.parser.parse(datestring, tzinfos= TZINFOS) # t is now a PDT datetime; convert it to UTC datetime_in_utc = datetime_in_pdt.astimezone(pytz.utc) # Let's convert it to a naive datetime object datetime_naive = datetime_in_utc.replace(tzinfo = None)