My guess is that the OP is parsing dates that have a numerical TZ offset (like most date formats found in internet protocols like http or email headers). But there's really no substitute for just calling

datetime(....., tzinfo=timezone(timedelta(hours=......)))

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
The reason that timezone() takes a timedelta is to avoid mistakes in the units.

That was more or less the original reasoning. Note that an early prototype required the offset to be specified in minutes. [1]

I don't expect people to have to construct timezone objects "by hand". You would normally get tzinfo populated with a local timezone by calling .astimezone() on a UTC instance:

>>> from datetime import *
>>> dt = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
>>> print(dt.astimezone())
2015-12-10 20:19:34.446688-05:00

[1]: http://bugs.python.org/issue5094#msg106911

--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)