5.1.6 tzinfo Objects

tzinfo is an abstract base clase, meaning that this class should not be instantiated directly. You need to derive a concrete subclass, and (at least) supply implementations of the standard tzinfo methods needed by the datetime methods you use. The datetime module does not supply any concrete subclasses of tzinfo.

An instance of (a concrete subclass of) tzinfo can be passed to the constructors for datetime and time objects. The latter objects view their members as being in local time, and the tzinfo object supports methods revealing offset of local time from UTC, the name of the time zone, and DST offset, all relative to a date or time object passed to them.

Special requirement for pickling: A tzinfo subclass must have an __init__ method that can be called with no arguments, else it can be pickled but possibly not unpickled again. This is a technical requirement that may be relaxed in the future.

A concrete subclass of tzinfo may need to implement the following methods. Exactly which methods are needed depends on the uses made of aware datetime objects. If in doubt, simply implement all of them.

These methods are called by a datetime or time object, in response to their methods of the same names. A datetime object passes itself as the argument, and a time object passes None as the argument. A tzinfo subclass's methods should therefore be prepared to accept a dt argument of None, or of class datetime.

When None is passed, it's up to the class designer to decide the best response. For example, returning None is appropriate if the class wishes to say that time objects don't participate in the tzinfo protocols. It may be more useful for utcoffset(None) to return the standard UTC offset, as there is no other convention for discovering the standard offset.

When a datetime object is passed in response to a datetime method, dt.tzinfo is the same object as self. tzinfo methods can rely on this, unless user code calls tzinfo methods directly. The intent is that the tzinfo methods interpret dt as being in local time, and not need worry about objects in other timezones.

from datetime import tzinfo, timedelta, datetime

ZERO = timedelta(0)
HOUR = timedelta(hours=1)

# A UTC class.

class UTC(tzinfo):
    """UTC"""

    def utcoffset(self, dt):
        return ZERO

    def tzname(self, dt):
        return "UTC"

    def dst(self, dt):
        return ZERO

utc = UTC()

# A class building tzinfo objects for fixed-offset time zones.
# Note that FixedOffset(0, "UTC") is a different way to build a
# UTC tzinfo object.

class FixedOffset(tzinfo):
    """Fixed offset in minutes east from UTC."""

    def __init__(self, offset, name):
        self.__offset = timedelta(minutes = offset)
        self.__name = name

    def utcoffset(self, dt):
        return self.__offset

    def tzname(self, dt):
        return self.__name

    def dst(self, dt):
        return ZERO

# A class capturing the platform's idea of local time.

import time as _time

STDOFFSET = timedelta(seconds = -_time.timezone)
if _time.daylight:
    DSTOFFSET = timedelta(seconds = -_time.altzone)
else:
    DSTOFFSET = STDOFFSET

DSTDIFF = DSTOFFSET - STDOFFSET

class LocalTimezone(tzinfo):

    def utcoffset(self, dt):
        if self._isdst(dt):
            return DSTOFFSET
        else:
            return STDOFFSET

    def dst(self, dt):
        if self._isdst(dt):
            return DSTDIFF
        else:
            return ZERO

    def tzname(self, dt):
        return _time.tzname[self._isdst(dt)]

    def _isdst(self, dt):
        tt = (dt.year, dt.month, dt.day,
              dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second,
              dt.weekday(), 0, -1)
        stamp = _time.mktime(tt)
        tt = _time.localtime(stamp)
        return tt.tm_isdst > 0

Local = LocalTimezone()

# A complete implementation of current DST rules for major US time zones.

def first_sunday_on_or_after(dt):
    days_to_go = 6 - dt.weekday()
    if days_to_go:
        dt += timedelta(days_to_go)
    return dt

# In the US, DST starts at 2am (standard time) on the first Sunday in April.
DSTSTART = datetime(1, 4, 1, 2)
# and ends at 2am (DST time; 1am standard time) on the last Sunday of Oct.
# which is the first Sunday on or after Oct 25.
DSTEND = datetime(1, 10, 25, 1)

class USTimeZone(tzinfo):

    def __init__(self, hours, reprname, stdname, dstname):
        self.stdoffset = timedelta(hours=hours)
        self.reprname = reprname
        self.stdname = stdname
        self.dstname = dstname

    def __repr__(self):
        return self.reprname

    def tzname(self, dt):
        if self.dst(dt):
            return self.dstname
        else:
            return self.stdname

    def utcoffset(self, dt):
        return self.stdoffset + self.dst(dt)

    def dst(self, dt):
        if dt is None or dt.tzinfo is None:
            # An exception may be sensible here, in one or both cases.
            # It depends on how you want to treat them.  The default
            # fromutc() implementation (called by the default astimezone()
            # implementation) passes a datetime with dt.tzinfo is self.
            return ZERO
        assert dt.tzinfo is self

        # Find first Sunday in April & the last in October.
        start = first_sunday_on_or_after(DSTSTART.replace(year=dt.year))
        end = first_sunday_on_or_after(DSTEND.replace(year=dt.year))

        # Can't compare naive to aware objects, so strip the timezone from
        # dt first.
        if start <= dt.replace(tzinfo=None) < end:
            return HOUR
        else:
            return ZERO

Eastern  = USTimeZone(-5, "Eastern",  "EST", "EDT")
Central  = USTimeZone(-6, "Central",  "CST", "CDT")
Mountain = USTimeZone(-7, "Mountain", "MST", "MDT")
Pacific  = USTimeZone(-8, "Pacific",  "PST", "PDT")

Note that there are unavoidable subtleties twice per year in a tzinfo subclass accounting for both standard and daylight time, at the DST transition points. For concreteness, consider US Eastern (UTC -0500), where EDT begins the minute after 1:59 (EST) on the first Sunday in April, and ends the minute after 1:59 (EDT) on the last Sunday in October:

    UTC   3:MM  4:MM  5:MM  6:MM  7:MM  8:MM
    EST  22:MM 23:MM  0:MM  1:MM  2:MM  3:MM
    EDT  23:MM  0:MM  1:MM  2:MM  3:MM  4:MM

  start  22:MM 23:MM  0:MM  1:MM  3:MM  4:MM

    end  23:MM  0:MM  1:MM  1:MM  2:MM  3:MM

When DST starts (the "start" line), the local wall clock leaps from 1:59 to 3:00. A wall time of the form 2:MM doesn't really make sense on that day, so astimezone(Eastern) won't deliver a result with hour == 2 on the day DST begins. In order for astimezone() to make this guarantee, the rzinfo.dst() method must consider times in the "missing hour" (2:MM for Eastern) to be in daylight time.

When DST ends (the "end" line), there's a potentially worse problem: there's an hour that can't be spelled unambiguously in local wall time: the last hour of daylight time. In Eastern, that's times of the form 5:MM UTC on the day daylight time ends. The local wall clock leaps from 1:59 (daylight time) back to 1:00 (standard time) again. Local times of the form 1:MM are ambiguous. astimezone() mimics the local clock's behavior by mapping two adjacent UTC hours into the same local hour then. In the Eastern example, UTC times of the form 5:MM and 6:MM both map to 1:MM when converted to Eastern. In order for astimezone() to make this guarantee, the tzinfo.dst() method must consider times in the "repeated hour" to be in standard time. This is easily arranged, as in the example, by expressing DST switch times in the time zone's standard local time.

Applications that can't bear such ambiguities should avoid using hybrid tzinfo subclasses; there are no ambiguities when using UTC, or any other fixed-offset tzinfo subclass (such as a class representing only EST (fixed offset -5 hours), or only EDT (fixed offset -4 hours)).