要获得与2.X标准库兼容的功能，请尝试：

calendar.timegm(time.strptime(date.split(".")[0]+"UTC", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z"))

calendar.timegm是time.mktime缺少的gm版本。

如今，Arrow还可以作为第三方解决方案：

>>> import arrow
>>> date = arrow.get("2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z")
>>> date.datetime
datetime.datetime(2008, 9, 3, 20, 56, 35, 450686, tzinfo=tzutc())

def parseISO8601DateTime(datetimeStr):
    import time
    from datetime import datetime, timedelta

    def log_date_string(when):
        gmt = time.gmtime(when)
        if time.daylight and gmt[8]:
            tz = time.altzone
        else:
            tz = time.timezone
        if tz > 0:
            neg = 1
        else:
            neg = 0
            tz = -tz
        h, rem = divmod(tz, 3600)
        m, rem = divmod(rem, 60)
        if neg:
            offset = '-%02d%02d' % (h, m)
        else:
            offset = '+%02d%02d' % (h, m)

        return time.strftime('%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S ', gmt) + offset

    dt = datetime.strptime(datetimeStr, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ')
    timestamp = dt.timestamp()
    return dt + timedelta(hours=dt.hour-time.gmtime(timestamp).tm_hour)

注意，如果字符串不以Z结尾，我们可以使用%Z进行解析。

这适用于Python 3.2以上版本的stdlib（假设所有时间戳都是UTC）：

from datetime import datetime, timezone, timedelta
datetime.strptime(timestamp, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ").replace(
    tzinfo=timezone(timedelta(0)))

例如

>>> datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=timezone(timedelta(0)))
... datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 11, 6, 2, 47, 879129, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

如果不想使用dateutil，可以尝试使用以下函数：

def from_utc(utcTime,fmt="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ"):
    """
    Convert UTC time string to time.struct_time
    """
    # change datetime.datetime to time, return time.struct_time type
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(utcTime, fmt)

测试：

from_utc("2007-03-04T21:08:12.123Z")

结果：

datetime.datetime(2007, 3, 4, 21, 8, 12, 123000)

import re
import datetime
s = "2008-09-03T20:56:35.450686Z"
d = datetime.datetime(*map(int, re.split(r'[^\d]', s)[:-1]))