How do I convert local time to UTC in Python?

Question

How do I convert a datetime string in local time to a string in UTC time?

I'm sure I've done this before, but can't find it and SO will hopefully help me (and others) do that in future.

Clarification: For example, if I have 2008-09-17 14:02:00 in my local timezone (+10), I'd like to generate a string with the equivalent UTC time: 2008-09-17 04:02:00.

Also, from http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/7/15/eppur-si-muove/, note that in general this isn't possible as with DST and other issues there is no unique conversion from local time to UTC time.

Answer 1

Using http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/

arrowObj = arrow.Arrow.strptime('2017-02-20 10:00:00', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' , 'US/Eastern')

arrowObj.to('UTC') or arrowObj.to('local') 

This library makes life easy :)

Answer 2

In python3:

pip install python-dateutil

from dateutil.parser import tz

mydt.astimezone(tz.gettz('UTC')).replace(tzinfo=None) 

Answer 3

import time

import datetime

def Local2UTC(LocalTime):

    EpochSecond = time.mktime(LocalTime.timetuple())
    utcTime = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(EpochSecond)

    return utcTime

>>> LocalTime = datetime.datetime.now()

>>> UTCTime = Local2UTC(LocalTime)

>>> LocalTime.ctime()

'Thu Feb  3 22:33:46 2011'

>>> UTCTime.ctime()

'Fri Feb  4 05:33:46 2011'

Answer 4

You can do it with:

>>> from time import strftime, gmtime, localtime
>>> strftime('%H:%M:%S', gmtime()) #UTC time
>>> strftime('%H:%M:%S', localtime()) # localtime

Answer 5

First, parse the string into a naive datetime object. This is an instance of datetime.datetime with no attached timezone information. See documentation for datetime.strptime for information on parsing the date string.

Use the pytz module, which comes with a full list of time zones + UTC. Figure out what the local timezone is, construct a timezone object from it, and manipulate and attach it to the naive datetime.

Finally, use datetime.astimezone() method to convert the datetime to UTC.

Source code, using local timezone "America/Los_Angeles", for the string "2001-2-3 10:11:12":

import pytz, datetime
local = pytz.timezone ("America/Los_Angeles")
naive = datetime.datetime.strptime ("2001-2-3 10:11:12", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
local_dt = local.localize(naive, is_dst=None)
utc_dt = local_dt.astimezone(pytz.utc)

From there, you can use the strftime() method to format the UTC datetime as needed:

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

Answer 6

I've had the most success with python-dateutil:

from dateutil import tz

def datetime_to_utc(date):
    """Returns date in UTC w/o tzinfo"""
    return date.astimezone(tz.gettz('UTC')).replace(tzinfo=None) if date.tzinfo else date