Change Timezone for Date object Python

Question

Hello I am using Pythonanywhere and when I call

from datetime import *

print date.today().day

It is printing a different day than the day it is where I live (Austin, Texas). I figured it is because there is a timezone difference. How would I tell the date object where I live so it gets the right timezone. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The most robust way to do this is to use pytz. You can install it simply with pip install pytz.

To get the local date with pytz, you can simply do this (note that the date.today method will not take a timezone):

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> import pytz
>>> local_date = datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Central'))  # use datetime here
>>> local_date.date()                                       # now call date method
datetime.date(2014, 11, 30)

Compare that to the present Greenwich date:

>>> greenwich_date = datetime.now(pytz.timezone('Etc/Greenwich'))
>>> greenwich_date.date()
datetime.date(2014, 12, 1)

Answer 2

In the standard library, there is no cross-platform way to create aware timezones without creating your own timezone class. The pytz library has an up-to-date database of most timezones. You can therefore do:

import pytz
from datetime import datetime
datetime.now(pytz.utc)

The .utc gives you a localized timezone by default, but you may wish to explicitly provide another timezone using .timezone() method.