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

This may not have been around when this question was originally written, but here is a snippet to get the time zone official designation:

>>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
>>> eastern.zone
'US/Eastern'

Further, this can be used with a non-naive datetime object (aka a datetime where the actual timezone has been set using pytz..localize() or datetime_object.astimezone(pytz.) as follows:

>>> import datetime, pytz
>>> todaynow = datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.timezone('US/Hawaii'))
>>> todaynow.tzinfo # turned into a string, it can be split/parsed

>>> todaynow.strftime("%Z")
'HST'
>>> todaynow.tzinfo.zone
'US/Hawaii'

This is, of course, for the edification of those search engine users who landed here. ... See more at the pytz module site.