/tzlocal

A Python module that tries to figure out what your local timezone is

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

tzlocal

This Python module returns a tzinfo object with the local timezone information under Unix and Win-32. It requires pytz, and returns pytz tzinfo objects.

This module attempts to fix a glaring hole in pytz, that there is no way to get the local timezone information, unless you know the zoneinfo name, and under several Linux distros that's hard or impossible to figure out.

Also, with Windows different timezone system using pytz isn't of much use unless you separately configure the zoneinfo timezone name.

With tzlocal you only need to call get_localzone() and you will get a tzinfo object with the local time zone info. On some Unices you will still not get to know what the timezone name is, but you don't need that when you have the tzinfo file. However, if the timezone name is readily available it will be used.

Supported systems

These are the systems that are in theory supported:

  • Windows 2000 and later
  • Any unix-like system with a /etc/localtime or /usr/local/etc/localtime

If you have one of the above systems and it does not work, it's a bug. Please report it.

Please note that if you getting a time zone called local, this is not a bug, it's actually the main feature of tzlocal, that even if your system does NOT have a configuration file with the zoneinfo name of your time zone, it will still work.

You can also use tzlocal to get the name of your local timezone, but only if your system is configured to make that possible. tzlocal looks for the timezone name in /etc/timezone, /var/db/zoneinfo, /etc/sysconfig/clock and /etc/conf.d/clock. If your /etc/localtime is a symlink it can also extract the name from that symlink.

If you need the name of your local time zone, then please make sure your system is properly configured to allow that.

Usage

Load the local timezone:

>>> from tzlocal import get_localzone
>>> tz = get_localzone()
>>> tz
<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Warsaw' WMT+1:24:00 STD>

Create a local datetime:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> dt = tz.localize(datetime(2015, 4, 10, 7, 22))
>>> dt
datetime.datetime(2015, 4, 10, 7, 22, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Warsaw' CEST+2:00:00 DST>)

Lookup another timezone with pytz:

>>> import pytz
>>> eastern = pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')

Convert the datetime:

>>> dt.astimezone(eastern)
datetime.datetime(2015, 4, 10, 1, 22, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)

Maintainer

Contributors

  • Marc Van Olmen
  • Benjamen Meyer
  • Manuel Ebert
  • Xiaokun Zhu
  • Cameris
  • Edward Betts
  • McK KIM
  • Cris Ewing
  • Ayala Shachar
  • Lev Maximov
  • Jakub Wilk
  • John Quarles
  • Preston Landers
  • Victor Torres
  • Jean Jordaan
  • Zackary Welch
  • Mickaël Schoentgen

(Sorry if I forgot someone)

License