Python Language Tutorial => Parsing a string with a short time zone...

Example

Using the dateutil library as in the previous example on parsing timezone-aware timestamps, it is also possible to parse timestamps with a specified "short" time zone name.

For dates formatted with short time zone names or abbreviations, which are generally ambiguous (e.g. CST, which could be Central Standard Time, China Standard Time, Cuba Standard Time, etc - more can be found here) or not necessarily available in a standard database, it is necessary to specify a mapping between time zone abbreviation and tzinfo object.

from dateutil import tz
from dateutil.parser import parse

ET = tz.gettz('US/Eastern')
CT = tz.gettz('US/Central')
MT = tz.gettz('US/Mountain')
PT = tz.gettz('US/Pacific')

us_tzinfos = {'CST': CT, 'CDT': CT,
              'EST': ET, 'EDT': ET,
              'MST': MT, 'MDT': MT,
              'PST': PT, 'PDT': PT}

dt_est = parse('2014-01-02 04:00:00 EST', tzinfos=us_tzinfos)
dt_pst = parse('2016-03-11 16:00:00 PST', tzinfos=us_tzinfos)

After running this:

dt_est
# datetime.datetime(2014, 1, 2, 4, 0, tzinfo=tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern'))
dt_pst
# datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 11, 16, 0, tzinfo=tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Pacific'))

It is worth noting that if using a pytz time zone with this method, it will not be properly localized:

from dateutil.parser import parse
import pytz

EST = pytz.timezone('America/New_York')
dt = parse('2014-02-03 09:17:00 EST', tzinfos={'EST': EST})

This simply attaches the pytz time zone to the datetime:

dt.tzinfo # Will be in Local Mean Time!
# <DstTzInfo 'America/New_York' LMT-1 day, 19:04:00 STD>

If using this method, you should probably re-localize the naive portion of the datetime after parsing:

dt_fixed = dt.tzinfo.localize(dt.replace(tzinfo=None))
dt_fixed.tzinfo # Now it's EST.
# <DstTzInfo 'America/New_York' EST-1 day, 19:00:00 STD>)

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Python Language Date and Time Parsing a string with a short time zone name into a timezone aware datetime object

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