How to get the common name for a pytz timezone eg. EST/EDT for America/New_York

Question

Given a pytz timezone for a particular user(calculated from his offset), i want to display the common name for that timezone. I\'m assuming people are more accustomed to see

Answer 1

If you are looking for the abbreviations then there are a few ways that come to mind.

First would be:

>>> from pytz import timezone
>>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
>>> eastern._tzname
'EST'

Although since that references a property with the preceding single underscore it may be considered private and might not be the best place to grab it. The other would be from a localized datetime object.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> loc_dt = eastern.localize(datetime.now())
>>> loc_dt.strftime('%Z')
'EST'