Python: Figure out local timezone

Question

I want to compare UTC timestamps from a log file with local timestamps. When creating the local datetime object, I use something like:

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Answer 1

Here's a way to get the local timezone using only the standard library, (only works in a *nix environment):

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

You can use this to create a pytz timezone:

>>> import pytz
>>> my_tz_name = '/'.join(os.path.realpath('/etc/localtime').split('/')[-2:])
>>> my_tz = pytz.timezone(my_tz_name)
>>> my_tz
<DstTzInfo 'Australia/Sydney' LMT+10:05:00 STD>

...which you can then apply to a datetime:

>>> import datetime
>>> now = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> now
datetime.datetime(2014, 9, 3, 9, 23, 24, 139059)

>>> now.replace(tzinfo=my_tz)
>>> now
datetime.datetime(2014, 9, 3, 9, 23, 24, 139059, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Australia/Sydney' LMT+10:05:00 STD>)

Answer 2

In Python 3.x, local timezone can be figured out like this:

import datetime
LOCAL_TIMEZONE = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone().tzinfo

It's a tricky use of datetime's code .

For python >= 3.6, you'll need

import datetime
LOCAL_TIMEZONE = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0))).astimezone().tzinfo

Answer 3

Based on J. F. Sebastian's answer, you can do this with the standard library:

import time, datetime
local_timezone = datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=-time.timezone))

Tested in 3.4, should work on 3.4+

Answer 4

Here's a slightly more concise version of @vbem's solution:

from datetime import datetime as dt

dt.utcnow().astimezone().tzinfo

The only substantive difference is that I replaced datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) with datetime.datetime.utcnow(). For brevity, I also aliased datetime.datetime as dt.

For my purposes, I want the UTC offset in seconds. Here's what that looks like:

dt.utcnow().astimezone().utcoffset().total_seconds()

Answer 5

now_dt = datetime.datetime.now()
utc_now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
now_ts, utc_ts = map(time.mktime, map(datetime.datetime.timetuple, (now_dt, utc_now)))
offset = int((now_ts - utc_ts) / 3600)

hope this will help you.

Answer 6

I was asking the same to myself, and I found the answer in 1:

Take a look at section 8.1.7: the format "%z" (lowercase, the Z uppercase returns also the time zone, but not in the 4-digit format, but in the form of timezone abbreviations, like in [3]) of strftime returns the form "+/- 4DIGIT" that is standard in email headers (see section 3.3 of RFC 2822, see [2], which obsoletes the other ways of specifying the timezone for email headers).

So, if you want your timezone in this format, use:

time.strftime("%z")

[1] http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html

[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-3.3

[3] Timezone abbreviations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviations , only for reference.