Time zone field in isoformat

Question

I have a timestamp that is supposed to be in EST:

2014-10-06T18:06:40-04:56

I understand this first part: 2014-10-06T18:06:40,

Answer 1

I suggest looking at arrow. The above answers worked but make the code really confusing to follow. Arrow lets you do this simply using:

In [82]: start_time = arrow.get(2014, 10, 6, 18).to('US/Eastern')
In [83]: end_time = start_time.shift(seconds=400)
In [84]: start_time
Out[84]: 
In [85]: end_time
Out[85]: 

You can retrieve the datetime objects by using

In [86]: start_time.datetime
Out[86]: datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 6, 14, 0, tzinfo=tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern'))