Add tz argument to date.today()
Since "today" depends on the time zone, it should be an optional argument to date.today(). The interface should be the same as datetime.now(tz=None), with date.today() returning the date in the system time zone. Rationale: It is common for processes to run in different timezones than the relevant end user. The most common case is probably a server running in UTC, which needs to do date calculations in timezones elsewhere. As a contrived example, you might do something like: tomorrow = date.today() + timedelta(days=1) return render_template(..., ship_by_date=tomorrow) But then if fulfillment is operating e.g. in US/Pacific time, the ship by date suddenly shows two days hence after 5 or 6pm when UTC midnight happens. In my particular use case, we get some collection of business rules about when a particular record is considered "stale" or prioritized, and naively using date.today() can lead to off-by-one errors. The way to "fix" the code above is to reference "now": tomorrow = datetime.now(tz=...).date() + timedelta(days=1) return render_template(..., ship_by_date=tomorrow) While this is not terrible, it seems like the API between now() and today() should be consistent: in reality, they need the same set of inputs. Calling date.today(...) is more explicit and specific than calling datetime.now(...).date(). Best wishes, Lucas
participants (3)
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Lucas Wiman -
Paul Bryan -
Steven D'Aprano