What is the right way to convert a naive time and a tzinfo
into an UTC time?
Say I have:
d = datetime(2009, 8, 31, 22, 30, 30)
tz = timezone('US/Pacific')
First way, pytz inspired:
d_tz = tz.normalize(tz.localize(d))
utc = pytz.timezone('UTC')
d_utc = d_tz.astimezone(utc)
Second way, from UTCDateTimeField
def utc_from_localtime(dt, tz):
dt = dt.replace(tzinfo=tz)
_dt = tz.normalize(dt)
if dt.tzinfo != _dt.tzinfo:
# Houston, we have a problem...
# find out which one has a dst offset
if _dt.tzinfo.dst(_dt):
_dt -= _dt.tzinfo.dst(_dt)
else:
_dt += dt.tzinfo.dst(dt)
return _dt.astimezone(pytz.utc)
Needless to say those two methods produce different results for quite a few timezones.
Question is - what's the right way?
Your first method seems to be the approved one, and should be DST-aware.
You could shorten it a tiny bit, since pytz.utc = pytz.timezone('UTC'), but you knew that already :)
tz = timezone('US/Pacific')
def toUTC(d):
return tz.normalize(tz.localize(d)).astimezone(pytz.utc)
print "Test: ", datetime.datetime.utcnow(), " = ", toUTC(datetime.datetime.now())
What is the right way to convert a naive time and a tzinfo into an utc time?
This answer enumerates some issues with converting a local time to UTC:
from datetime import datetime
import pytz # $ pip install pytz
d = datetime(2009, 8, 31, 22, 30, 30)
tz = pytz.timezone('US/Pacific')
# a) raise exception for non-existent or ambiguous times
aware_d = tz.localize(d, is_dst=None)
## b) assume standard time, adjust non-existent times
#aware_d = tz.normalize(tz.localize(d, is_dst=False))
## c) assume DST is in effect, adjust non-existent times
#aware_d = tz.normalize(tz.localize(naive_d, is_dst=True))
# convert to UTC
utc_d = aware_d.astimezone(pytz.utc)
Use the first method. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel of timezone conversion
import pytz
from django.utils import timezone
tz = pytz.timezone('America/Los_Angeles')
time = tz.normalize(timezone.now())