Caught out by daylight saving :-(

[Dave Angel]

There isn't any right answer.  There are two very different ways you can 
interpret daylight savings time on a time conversion.  I suspect you're 
on Windows, trying to look at an old file's datestamp, and expect it to 
look like Windows displays it.  But Windows isn't even consistent with 
itself, doing something different on a FAT system than on NTFS.

For most of my own purposes, I've decided to only store the UTC times 
for things.  Local time is useful only for interactive display.  And 
that interactive display is calculated according to some context.

To illustrate the problem, suppose you were in Chicago last month, and 
modified a file at 2:00 pm, CST.   And now you are located in PDT time 
zone, and want to know when the file was last modified.  Should you 
convert the time zone and daylight savings, or should you convert only 
time zone, or should you display the time as it was known to you at the 
original change?

And to make it more complex, suppose the disk drive involved was located 
in France.  Just what time is correct?

Anything other than UTC is subject to confusion.

CinnamonDonkey wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I had the following bit of code which was working fine until we went
> into Daylight saving this weekend, now the result is an hour out.
>
>     timeString = "20090330 15:45:23"
>
>     timeFormat = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'
>
>     modificationTime = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp( time.mktime
> ( time.strptime( timeString, timeFormat ) ) )
>     minutesToAdvance = datetime.timedelta( minutes=5 )
>
>     modificationTime = modificationTime + minutesToAdvance
>
>     datetimeString = str ( modificationTime ).replace( ' ', 'T' )
>
>
> The expected result should be:
>
>     datetimeString = "20090330T15:50:23"
>
> But instead I get:
>
>     datetimeString = "20090330T14:50:23"
>
> I believe it is going wrong at either the mktime() or utcfromtimestamp
> () stage.
>
> What is the correct way to fix this compensating for daylight saving
> automatically?
>
> Regards,
> SHaun >8)
>
>
>