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

If you want only literally what you asked for, "the timezone name of the form America/New_York, corresponding to the system local timezone", and if you only care about Linux (and similar), then this should do the job:

import os
import os.path
import sys 

def main(argv):
  tzname = os.environ.get('TZ')
  if tzname:
    print tzname
  elif os.path.exists('/etc/timezone'):
    print file('/etc/timezone').read()
  else:
    sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main(sys.argv)

Of course it would be nicer to have a library that encapsulates this in a cleaner way, and that perhaps handles the other cases you mention in comments like already having a tzinfo object. I think you can do that with pytz mentioned by Amber but it's not obvious to me just how...