Convert Time Zone + format in Python from Twitter

Question

In Python, with TwitterSearch, I'm able to get the timestamp of the tweet in UTC time, in the following format :

Thu Mar 19 12:37:15 +0000 2015

However, I would like to obtain it automatically in the EST timezone (UTC - 4), in this format :

2015-03-19 08:37:15

Here is a sample of my code. What should I change in it for an automatic conversion?

            for tweet in ts.search_tweets_iterable(tso):
            lat = None
            long = None
            user = tweet['user']['screen_name']
            user_creation = tweet['user']['created_at']
            created_at = tweet['created_at'] # UTC time when Tweet was created.
            favorite = tweet['favorite_count']
            retweet = tweet ['retweet_count']
            id_status = tweet['id']
            in_reply_to = tweet['in_reply_to_screen_name']
            followers = tweet['user']['followers_count'] # nombre d'abonnés
            statuses_count = tweet['user']['statuses_count'] # nombre d'abonnés
            location = tweet['user']['location'] # résidence du twittos
            tweet_text = tweet['text'].strip() # deux lignes enlèvent espaces inutiles
            tweet_text = ''.join(tweet_text.splitlines())
            print i,created_at,user_creation,user, tweet_text
            if tweet['geo'] and tweet['geo']['coordinates'][0]: 
                lat, long = tweet['geo']['coordinates'][:2]
                print u'@%s: %s' % (user, tweet_text), lat, long
            else:
                print u'@%s: %s' % (user, tweet_text)
            print favorite,retweet,id_status,in_reply_to,followers,statuses_count,location

            writer.writerow([user.encode('utf8'), user_creation.encode('utf8'), created_at.encode('utf8'), 
                             tweet_text.encode('utf8'), favorite, retweet, id_status, in_reply_to, followers, statuses_count, location.encode('utf8'), lat, long])
            i += 1
            if i > max:
                return()

Thank you in advance!

Florent

Answer 1

If EST is your local timezone then you could do it using only stdlib:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
from email.utils import parsedate_tz, mktime_tz

timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz('Thu Mar 19 12:37:15 +0000 2015'))
s = str(datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp))
# -> '2015-03-19 08:37:15'

It supports non-UTC input timezones too.

Or you could specify the destination timezone explicitly:

import pytz # $ pip install pytz

dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp, pytz.timezone('US/Eastern'))
s = dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
# -> '2015-03-19 08:37:15'

---

You could put it in a function:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
from email.utils import parsedate_tz, mktime_tz

def to_local_time(tweet_time_string):
    """Convert rfc 5322 -like time string into a local time
       string in rfc 3339 -like format.

    """
    timestamp = mktime_tz(parsedate_tz(tweet_time_string))
    return datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

time_string = to_local_time('Thu Mar 19 12:37:15 +0000 2015')
# use time_string here..

Answer 2

Remove the +0000 from the date sent by twitter and do something like:

from datetime import datetime
import pytz

local = 'Europe/London' #or the local from where twitter date is coming from
dt = datetime.strptime("Thu Mar 19 12:37:15 2015", "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")
dt = pytz.timezone(local).localize(dt)
est_dt = dt.astimezone(pytz.timezone('EST'))

print est_dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

Output:

2015-03-19 07:37:15

Alternatively you can do something like (in this case you don't need to remove the +0000 timezone info):

from dateutil import parser

dt = parser.parse("Thu Mar 19 12:37:15 +0000 2015")
est_dt = dt.astimezone(pytz.timezone('EST'))

print est_dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

Output

2015-03-19 07:37:15

By the way, EST is UTC-4 or UTC-5?