pytz - Python World Timezones

Stuart Bishop zen at shangri-la.dropbear.id.au
Wed Jun 23 16:53:39 UTC 2004


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		http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytz/

pytz is a transformation of the public domain Olsen timezone
database into pure Python code. This library allows accurate and
cross platform timezone calculations using Python 2.3 or higher.

This implementation solves the issue of ambiguous times at the end
of daylight savings, which you can read more about in the Python
Library Reference (datetime.tzinfo). The only remaining inaccuracy
is that datetime.strftime only reports the UTC offset to the nearest
minute (This is probably a feature - you have to draw a line somewhere).

536 of the Olsen timezones are supported. The missing few are for
Riyadh Solar Time in 1987, 1988 and 1989. As Saudi Arabia gave up
trying to cope with their timezone definition, I see no reason
to complicate my code further to cope with them. (I understand
the intention was to set sunset to 0:00 local time, the start of the
Islamic day. In the best case caused the DST offset to change daily
and worst case caused the DST offset to change each instant depending
on how you interpreted the ruling.)

Note that if you perform date arithmetic on local times that cross DST
boundaries, the results may be in an incorrect timezone (ie. subtract
1 minute from 2002-10-27 1:00 EST and you get 2002-10-27 0:59 EST
instead of the correct 2002-10-27 1:59 EDT). This cannot be resolved
without modifying the Python datetime implementation. However, these
tzinfo classes provide a normalize() method which allows you to correct
these values.

Installation
============

This is a standard Python distutils distribution. To install the
package, run the following command as an administrative user::

     python setup.py install

License
=======

BSD style license. I'm more than happy to relicense this code for
inclusion in other open source projects.

Example & Usage
===============

     >>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
     >>> from pytz import timezone
     >>> utc = timezone('UTC')
     >>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
     >>> utc_dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0, tzinfo=utc)
     >>> loc_dt = utc_dt.astimezone(eastern)
     >>> fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z (%z)'
     >>> loc_dt.strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:00:00 EST (-0500)'
     >>> (loc_dt - timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 00:50:00 EST (-0500)'
     >>> eastern.normalize(loc_dt - timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:50:00 EDT (-0400)'
     >>> (loc_dt + timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:10:00 EST (-0500)'

Latest Versions
===============

This module will be updated after releases of the Olsen timezone 
database.
The latest version can be downloaded from sourceforge_.

.. _sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytz/

Further Reading
===============

More info than you want to know about timezones::

     http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

Contact
=======

Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net>

- --  
Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
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