On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Tim Peters
[...] Stewart, I still don't grasp what your problem is. The only concrete example I've seen is dealing with this string:
2004-10-31 01:15 EST-05:00
where you knew "EST" meant US/Eastern, but you haven't explained exactly what you're trying to _do_ with it. If you're trying to create an aware datetime out of it in a post-PEP-495 pytz, then "the obvious" way is:
1. Create a UTC datetime out of "2004-10-31 01:15" alone. 2. Create timedelta(hours=-5) out of "-05:00" alone. 3. Subtract the result of #2 from the result of #1, to convert to UTC for real. 4. Invoke .astimezone() on the result of #3, passing pytz's spelling of "US/Eastern".
Funny, I would have done it this way (but the outcome should be the same): 1. Create a naive datetime out of "2004-10-31 01:15" alone. 2. Create timedelta(hours=-5) out of "-05:00" alone. 3. Subtract the result of #2 from the result of #1 to get the UTC time as a naive datetime. 4. Use .replace(tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc) to mark the result as UTC. 5. Invoke .astimezone() on the result of #3, passing pytz's spelling of "US/Eastern". Only #5 requires pytz (though you could use pytz.utc in #4 -- it doesn't matter). My reason for the extra step is philosophical: the datetime created in the first step is just a (date, time) combo that *doesn't know* its timezone yet. Only after step 3 do we have the designated point in time, so then we can mark it as UTC. Of course, since the result is the same, if Tim's version is faster that's a fine way to do it -- but IMO mine makes it clearer what's going on. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)