hustbeta / tzlocal

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

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.

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.now())
>>> dt
datetime.datetime(2012, 9, 11, 14, 43, 42, 518871, 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(2012, 9, 11, 8, 43, 42, 518871, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)

Contributors

• Lennart Regebro, [e-mail]

License

• CC0 1.0 Universal http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/