[python] Python datetime strptime() and strftime(): how to preserve the timezone information

See the following code:

import datetime
import pytz

fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z'

d = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone("America/New_York"))
d_string = d.strftime(fmt)
d2 = datetime.datetime.strptime(d_string, fmt)
print d_string 
print d2.strftime(fmt)

the output is

2013-02-07 17:42:31 EST
2013-02-07 17:42:31 

The timezone information simply got lost in the translation.

If I switch '%Z' to '%z', I get

ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z'

I know I can use python-dateutil, but I just found it bizzare that I can't achieve this simple feature in datetime and have to introduce more dependency?

Try this:

import pytz
import datetime

fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z'

d = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone("America/New_York"))
d_string = d.strftime(fmt)
d2 = pytz.timezone('America/New_York').localize(d.strptime(d_string,fmt), is_dst=None)
print(d_string)
print(d2.strftime(fmt))

Unfortunately, strptime() can only handle the timezone configured by your OS, and then only as a time offset, really. From the documentation:

Support for the %Z directive is based on the values contained in tzname and whether daylight is true. Because of this, it is platform-specific except for recognizing UTC and GMT which are always known (and are considered to be non-daylight savings timezones).

strftime() doesn't officially support %z.

You are stuck with python-dateutil to support timezone parsing, I am afraid.

Here is my answer in Python 2.7

Print current time with timezone

from datetime import datetime
import tzlocal  # pip install tzlocal

print datetime.now(tzlocal.get_localzone()).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")

Print current time with specific timezone

from datetime import datetime
import pytz # pip install pytz

print datetime.now(pytz.timezone('Asia/Taipei')).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")

It will print something like

2017-08-10 20:46:24 +0800