Get time zone information of the system in Python?

Question

I want to get the default timezone (PST) of my system from Python. What's the best way to do that? I'd like to avoid forking another process.

Answer 1

This should work:

import time
time.tzname

time.tzname returns a tuple of two strings: The first is the name of the local non-DST timezone, the second is the name of the local DST timezone.

Example return: ('MST', 'MDT')

Answer 2

Gives a UTC offset like in ThomasH's answer, but takes daylight savings into account.

>>> import time
>>> offset = time.timezone if (time.localtime().tm_isdst == 0) else time.altzone
>>> offset / 60 / 60 * -1
-9

The value of time.timezone or time.altzone is in seconds West of UTC (with areas East of UTC getting a negative value). This is the opposite to how we'd actually like it, hence the * -1.

time.localtime().tm_isdst will be zero if daylight savings is currently not in effect (although this may not be correct if an area has recently changed their daylight savings law).

EDIT: marr75 is correct, I've edited the answer accordingly.

Answer 3

I found this to work well:

import datetime
tz_string = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone().tzname()

For me this was able to differentiate between daylight savings and not.

From Python 3.6 you can do:

tz_string = datetime.datetime.now().astimezone().tzname()

Or

tz_string = datetime.datetime.now().astimezone().tzinfo

Reference with more detail: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39079819/4549682

Answer 4

Check out the Python Time Module.

from time import gmtime, strftime
print(strftime("%z", gmtime()))

Pacific Standard Time

Answer 5

For Python 3.6+ this can be easily achieved by following code:

import datetime
local_timezone = datetime.datetime.utcnow().astimezone().tzinfo

print(local_timezone)

But with Python < 3.6 calling astimezone() on naive datetime doesn't work. So we've to do it in a slightly different way.

So for Python 3.x,

import datetime
local_timezone = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone().tzinfo

print(local_timezone)

Sample Output:
On Netherlands Server(Python 3.6.9): CEST
On Bangladesh Server(Python 3.8.2): +06

More details can be found on this thread.

Answer 6

The code snippets for calculating offset are incorrect, see http://bugs.python.org/issue7229.

The correct way to handle this is:

def local_time_offset(t=None):
    """Return offset of local zone from GMT, either at present or at time t."""
    # python2.3 localtime() can't take None
    if t is None:
        t = time.time()

    if time.localtime(t).tm_isdst and time.daylight:
        return -time.altzone
    else:
        return -time.timezone

This is in all likelihood, not the exact question that the OP asked, but there are two incorrect snippets on the page and time bugs suck to track down and fix.

Answer 7

To obtain timezone information in the form of a datetime.tzinfo object, use dateutil.tz.tzlocal():

from dateutil import tz
myTimeZone = tz.tzlocal()

This object can be used in the tz parameter of datetime.datetime.now():

from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import tz
localisedDatetime = datetime.now(tz = tz.tzlocal())

or the tz parameter of datetime object via datetime.datetime.astimezone():

from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import tz
unlocalisedDatetime = datetime.now()
localisedDatetime = unlocalisedDatetime.astimezone(tz = tz.tzlocal())

Answer 8

import tzlocal
tz_info = tzlocal.get_localzone() # 'US/Central' or 'Asia/Calcutta'
dt = datetime.now()        # 2023-01-15 15:17:24.412430
print(tz_info.localize(dt) # 2023-01-15 15:17:24.412430-06:00

with tzlocal we will be able to get the local timezone.

Answer 9

Getting offset from UTC as timedelta:

from datetime import datetime, timezone

now = datetime.now()
now.replace(tzinfo=timezone.utc) - now.astimezone(timezone.utc)

Or like this (more obscure but also works):

datetime.now(timezone.utc).astimezone().tzinfo.utcoffset(None)

Both solutions give the same result. For example: datetime.timedelta(seconds=7200)

Answer 10

The problem is there are multiple time zone formats, namely:

1. IANA Time Zone Database: "TZ Identifier" (e.g. "Africa/Addis_Ababa")
2. IANA Time Zone Database: "abbreviation" (e.g. "EAT")
3. Microsoft Time Zone Index (e.g. "E. Africa Standard Time")
4. UTC offset (e.g. "+03:00" or "UTC+03:00")
5. The ISO 3166-1 country codes are sometimes also used to reference time zones but these do not map cleanly (e.g. "ET", "ETH", or 231)

Here's how to get all time zones and the system time zone, in all these formats:

Database Name	Example	List all time zones	Get system time zone
IANA Time Zone Identifiers	'Asia/Bangkok'	import zoneinfo as zi; zi.available_timezones() or pytz.all_timezones	import tzlocal as tzl; str(tzl.get_localzone())
IANA Time Zone Abbreviations	'ICT'	In Python I'm not sure how; see the IANA wiki page for a list	See this answer
Microsoft Time Zone Index	'SE Asia Standard Time'	** Note 1	time.tzname[0]
Time zone offset	'+07:00'	N/A	** Note 2

** Note 1: in Powershell,

[System.TimeZoneInfo]::GetSystemTimeZones()

** Note 2: in Python,

iana_tz = str(tzlocal.get_localzone())
pytz_tz = pytz.timezone(iana_tz)
offset_str = datetime.datetime.now().astimezone(pytz_tz).strftime("%z")
offset_str = offset_str[:3] + ':' + offset_str[3:]