python converting any datetime string to UTC [duplicate]

Question

I have a tedious function that does something like this:

...
if ('PDT' in stringVal) or ('PST' in stringVal):
    utcdateTime = convert(stringVal)+(hardcode the offset)
elif('EDT' in stringVal)...
...

I looked at several posts including this but couldn't find anything that fits my purpose. I also looked at datetime.datetime and the whole datetime module in general but it has things like .now(); .utcnow(); datetime.now(tz.pytz.utc) etc etc. Basically if I have something like:

2014-05-01 01:02:03 PDT
2014-05-01 01:02:03 PST
2014-05-01 01:02:03 EDT
2014-05-01 01:02:03 EST
2014-05-01 01:02:03 MDT
2014-05-01 01:02:03 MST

Is there a python module that has some method I can use to convert those above datetime strings to UTC? If there is none, I will just stick with the hard-coded way I have.

Not exactly a duplicate, but a similar / inverse problem. You should find how to parse timezones and convert from local to utc in the answers. — viraptor
– viraptor, Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 0:38
Neither of those seem to be duplicates, one doesn't deal with timezones, and the other is doing the reverse, converting from UTC — Brendan Abel
– Brendan Abel, Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 0:38
@BrendanAbel The reverse is not really the reverse. You're using .astimezone(...) with timezone as a parameter. Surely if you can write any Python at all, you can generalise that answer. — viraptor
– viraptor, Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 3:10
@viraptor I am going to try the solution in that post. Not a duplicate but something similar. I will try their way — Nikhil Gupta
– Nikhil Gupta, Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 14:57

Brendan Abel · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-13 03:21:29Z

2

You'll need to translate the timezone strings, but otherwise you can use the datetime and pytz libraries.

import datetime
import pytz

s = '2014-05-01 01:02:03 PST'
ds, tzs = s.rsplit(' ', 1)

tz_map = {
    'PST': 'US/Pacific', 
    'EST': 'US/Eastern'
}
tz = pytz.timezone(tz_map[tzs])

dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(ds, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S').replace(tzinfo=tz)
dt_utc = dt.astimezone(pytz.utc)

edited Apr 13, 2016 at 3:21

answered Apr 13, 2016 at 0:42

Brendan Abel

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5 Comments

Cyb3rFly3r Over a year ago

On line 5 there is an error: splitting by ' ' will result in three values being returned, not two.

Brendan Abel Over a year ago

Thanks, there was supposed to be a 1 as the second arg.

Nikhil Gupta Over a year ago

@BrendanAbel how would this handle "PDT" and "EDT" etc?

Brendan Abel Over a year ago

They use the same timezone as PST, EST. Pytz will use the correct one based on the date. If you actually want to force PDT during a PST date, you can use timezone.localize with a PDT date to get a static PDT timezone.

Nikhil Gupta Over a year ago

@BrendanAbel I tried using your code which works great but when I used "PDT" in the string, the UTC time was off by an hour.

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