there is a module that parses those strings pretty nicely, it’s called pyiso8601: http://code.google.com/p/pyiso8601/

in the context of writing a better plistlib, i also needed the capability to parse those strings, and decided not to use the sucky incomplete implementation of plistlib, but the one mentioned above.

i py3ified it, eliminating quite some code, and the result is pretty terse, check it out: https://github.com/flying-sheep/plist/blob/master/iso8601.py

note that that implementation returns utc-datetimes for timezoneless strings, instead of naive ones. (l.30)