Trying to parse the datetime string with timezone info and get the utc offset
from dateutil.parser import parse as parse_date
s = '2017-08-28 06:08:20,488 CDT'
dt = parse_date(s)
print(dt.utcoffset()) # prints `None`
Why is utcoffset returning None rather than -5 as offset?
From the datetime docs:
If tzinfo is None, returns None
In your code, dt.tzinfo is None, so the timezone information was not parsed by parse_date into the dt. Your datetime dt is "naive" (has no timezone information).
As per the dateutil docs, You can pass your own timezone information to parse_date as either a tzoffset or tzfile:
tzinfos = {"CDT": -21600}
dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20 CDT', tzinfos=tzinfos)
dt.tzinfo #tzoffset('CDT', -21600)
from dateutil import tz
tzinfos = {"CDT": tz.gettz('US/Central')}
dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20 CDT', tzinfos=tzinfos)
dt.tzinfo #tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central')
Or you can encode the timezone offset into the string:
dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20-06:00')
dt.tzinfo #tzoffset(None, -21600)