Dealing with Timezones in Python

Re:Dealing with Timezones in Python by riobard on Friday July 15, 2011 @10:46AM (#2767533)

I'm just bitten by this today: I was trying to get the time zone offset in Python to print the local time for an app.

Doing

    date +%z

in console gives me correct offset

    +0800

of China (we do not have DST anymore) while doing

    import time
    time.strftime('%z', time.localtime())

gives me

   +0706

WTF??!!! I can understand Python might not be able to get the correct timezone info from the system, but giving this kind of obviously incorrect offset is just dumb. Still searching for a solution other than manually configure Python code. If anyone knows why, I would be really glad for your help. Thanks in advance!

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Re:Dealing with Timezones in Python by wulczer on Friday July 15, 2011 @12:20PM (#2767981)

Use pytz.

  import pytz
  from datetime import datetime

  tz = pytz.timezone('Asia/Shanghai')
  tz.normalize(pytz.utc.localize(datetime.utcnow()).astimezone(tz))

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Re:Dealing with Timezones in Python by riobard on Friday July 15, 2011 @02:04PM (#2768422)

Thanks for the response! I'm looking for a solution such that Python will go and load system's time zone and use that---it's a nightmare to deploy an app to multiple severs located in different timezone and I have to change the timezone in Python manually.

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