How can I get a human-readable timezone name in Python?

Question

In a Python project I\'m working on, I\'d like to be able to get a \"human-readable\" timezone name of the form America/New_York, corresponding to the syste

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.