Get the Olson TZ name for the local timezone?

Question

How do I get the Olson timezone name (such as Australia/Sydney) corresponding to the value given by C\'s localtime call?

This is the value overridden vi

Answer 1

I think best bet is to go thru all pytz timezones and check which one matches local timezone, each pytz timezone object contains info about utcoffset and tzname like CDT, EST, same info about local time can be obtained from time.timezone/altzone and time.tzname, and I think that is enough to correctly match local timezone in pytz database e.g.

import time
import pytz
import datetime

local_names = []
if time.daylight:
    local_offset = time.altzone
    localtz = time.tzname[1]
else:
    local_offset = time.timezone
    localtz = time.tzname[0]

local_offset = datetime.timedelta(seconds=-local_offset)

for name in pytz.all_timezones:
    timezone = pytz.timezone(name)
    if not hasattr(timezone, '_tzinfos'):
        continue#skip, if some timezone doesn't have info
    # go thru tzinfo and see if short name like EDT and offset matches
    for (utcoffset, daylight, tzname), _ in timezone._tzinfos.iteritems():
        if utcoffset == local_offset and tzname == localtz:
            local_names.append(name)

print local_names

output:

['America/Atikokan', 'America/Bahia_Banderas', 'America/Bahia_Banderas', 'America/Belize', 'America/Cambridge_Bay', 'America/Cancun', 'America/Chicago', 'America/Chihuahua', 'America/Coral_Harbour', 'America/Costa_Rica', 'America/El_Salvador', 'America/Fort_Wayne', 'America/Guatemala', 'America/Indiana/Indianapolis', 'America/Indiana/Knox', 'America/Indiana/Marengo', 'America/Indiana/Marengo', 'America/Indiana/Petersburg', 'America/Indiana/Tell_City', 'America/Indiana/Vevay', 'America/Indiana/Vincennes', 'America/Indiana/Winamac', 'America/Indianapolis', 'America/Iqaluit', 'America/Kentucky/Louisville', 'America/Kentucky/Louisville', 'America/Kentucky/Monticello', 'America/Knox_IN', 'America/Louisville', 'America/Louisville', 'America/Managua', 'America/Matamoros', 'America/Menominee', 'America/Merida', 'America/Mexico_City', 'America/Monterrey', 'America/North_Dakota/Beulah', 'America/North_Dakota/Center', 'America/North_Dakota/New_Salem', 'America/Ojinaga', 'America/Pangnirtung', 'America/Rainy_River', 'America/Rankin_Inlet', 'America/Resolute', 'America/Resolute', 'America/Tegucigalpa', 'America/Winnipeg', 'CST6CDT', 'Canada/Central', 'Mexico/General', 'US/Central', 'US/East-Indiana', 'US/Indiana-Starke']

In production you can create such a mapping beforehand and save it instead of iterating always.

Testing script after changing timezone:

$ export TZ='Australia/Sydney'
$ python get_tz_names.py
['Antarctica/Macquarie', 'Australia/ACT', 'Australia/Brisbane', 'Australia/Canberra', 'Australia/Currie', 'Australia/Hobart', 'Australia/Lindeman', 'Australia/Melbourne', 'Australia/NSW', 'Australia/Queensland', 'Australia/Sydney', 'Australia/Tasmania', 'Australia/Victoria']

Answer 2

This will get you the time zone name, according to what's in the TZ variable, or localtime file if unset:

#! /usr/bin/env python

import time

time.tzset
print time.tzname

Answer 3

I changed tcurvelo's script to find the right form of time zone (Continent/..../City), in most of cases, but return all of them if fails

#!/usr/bin/env python

from hashlib import sha224
import os
from os import listdir
from os.path import join, isfile, isdir

infoDir = '/usr/share/zoneinfo/'

def get_current_olsonname():
    result = []
    tzfile_digest = sha224(open('/etc/localtime').read()).hexdigest()

    test_match = lambda filepath: sha224(open(filepath).read()).hexdigest() == tzfile_digest

    def walk_over(dirpath):
        for root, dirs, filenames in os.walk(dirpath):
            for fname in filenames:
                fpath = join(root, fname)
                if test_match(fpath):
                    result.append(tuple(root.split('/')[4:]+[fname]))

    for dname in listdir(infoDir):
        if dname in ('posix', 'right', 'SystemV', 'Etc'):
            continue
        dpath = join(infoDir, dname)
        if not isdir(dpath):
            continue
        walk_over(dpath)

    if not result:
        walk_over(join(infoDir))

    return result


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print get_current_olsonname()

Answer 4

This JavaScript project attempts to solve the same issue in the browser client-side. It works by playing "twenty questions" with the locale, asking for the UTC offset of certain past times (to test for summer time boundaries, etc.) and using those results to deduce what the local time zone must be. I am not aware of any equivalent Python package unfortunately, so if someone wanted to use this solution it would have to be ported to Python.

While this formula will require updating every time (at worst) the TZ database is updated, a combination of this algorithm and the solution proposed by Anurag Uniyal (keeping only possibilities returned by both methods) sounds to me like the surest way to compute the effective local timezone. As long as there is some difference between the UTC offset of at least one local time in any two time zones, such a system can correctly choose between them.

Answer 5

This is kind of cheating, I know, but getting from '/etc/localtime' doesn't work for you? Like following:

>>>  import os
>>> '/'.join(os.readlink('/etc/localtime').split('/')[-2:])
'Australia/Sydney'

Hope it helps.

Edit: I liked @A.H.'s idea, in case '/etc/localtime' isn't a symlink. Translating that into Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from hashlib import sha224
import os

def get_current_olsonname():
    tzfile = open('/etc/localtime')
    tzfile_digest = sha224(tzfile.read()).hexdigest()
    tzfile.close()

    for root, dirs, filenames in os.walk("/usr/share/zoneinfo/"):
        for filename in filenames:
            fullname = os.path.join(root, filename)
            f = open(fullname)
            digest = sha224(f.read()).hexdigest()
            if digest == tzfile_digest:
                return '/'.join((fullname.split('/'))[-2:])
            f.close()
        return None

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print get_current_olsonname()

Answer 6

If evaluating /etc/localtime is OK for you, the following trick might work - after translating it to python:

> md5sum /etc/localtime
abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefab /etc/localtime
> find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f |xargs md5sum | grep abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefab
abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefab /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London
abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefab /usr/share/zoneinfo/posix/Europe/London
...

The duplicates could be filtered using only the official region names "Europe", "America" ... If there are still duplicates, you could take the shortest name :-)