How can I convert a date/time string in local time into UTC in Python?

Question

I am trying to write a function that will convert a string date/time from local time to UTC in Python.

According to this question, you can use time.tzname to get some forms of the local timezone, but I have not found a way to use this in any of the datetime conversion methods. For example, this article shows there are a couple of things you can do with pytz and datetime to convert times, but all of them have timezones that are hardcoded in and are of different formats than what time.tznamereturns.

Currently I have the following code to translate a string-formatted time into milliseconds (Unix epoch):

local_time = time.strptime(datetime_str, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S") # expects UTC, but I want this to be local
dt = datetime.datetime(*local_time[:6])
ms = int((dt - datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(0)).total_seconds() * 1000)

However, this is expecting the time to be input as UTC. Is there a way to convert the string formatted time as if it were in the local timezone? Thanks.

Essentially, I want to be able to do what this answer does, but instead of hard-coding in "America/Los_Angeles", I want to be able to dynamically specify the local timezone.

from time import gmtime, strftime LocTime = strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S") GMTime = strftime("%Y %m %d T %H:%M:%S (GMT)", gmtime()) print "Local :",LocTime print "UTC :",GMTime — Mr. zero
– Mr. zero, Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 0:16
@Mr.zero Yes, I want to convert from local time to utc. Yes, I can also get that with time.tzname, but how can I use that to do a conversion from that timezone that it returns to UTC? For example, maybe using pytz's astimezone() method. — Logan
– Logan, Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 0:27
@Mr.zero I also want to be able to pass any time I want, not just using 'now'. Thanks for your help. — Logan
– Logan, Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 0:37

Mr. zero · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-30 00:44:31Z

2

If I understand your question correctly you want this :

from time import strftime,gmtime,mktime,strptime

# you can pass any time you want
strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime(mktime(strptime("Thu, 30 Jun 2016 03:12:40", "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"))))

# and here for real time
strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime(mktime(strptime(strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"), "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"))))

answered Jun 30, 2016 at 0:44

Mr. zero

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1 Comment

Logan Over a year ago

Awesome thank you! The first conversion has what I was looking for.

ListenSoftware Louise Ai Agent · Accepted Answer · 2021-09-01 17:59:17Z

0

make a time structure from a timetuple then use the structure to create a utc time

from datetime import datetime

def local_to_utc(local_st):
    time_struct = time.mktime(local_st)
    utc_st = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(time_struct)
    return utc_st

d=datetime(2016,6,30,3,12,40,0)
timeTuple = d.timetuple()
print(local_to_utc(timeTuple))

output:

2016-06-30 09:12:40

answered Sep 1, 2021 at 17:59

ListenSoftware Louise Ai Agent

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