How do I get a value of datetime today in Python that is timezone aware

Question

I am trying to subtract one date value from the value of datetime today   to calculate how long ago something was  But it complains   TypeError  can t subtract offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes   The value datetime today   doesn t seem to be  timezone aware   while my other date value is  How do I get a value of datetime today   that is timezone aware   Right now  it s giving me the time in local time  which happens to be PST  i e  UTC - 8 hours  Worst case  is there a way I can manually enter a timezone value into the datetime object returned by datetime today   and set it to UTC-8   Of course  the ideal solution would be for it to automatically know the timezone

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Tyler from  howchoo  made a really great article that helped me get a better idea of the Datetime Objects  link below  Working with Datetime  essentially  I just added the following to the end of both my datetime objects   replace tzinfo pytz utc    Example   import pytz import datetime from datetime  date   datetime now   replace tzinfo pytz utc

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If you are using Django  you can set dates non-tz aware  only UTC    Comment the following line in settings py   USE TZ   True

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In the standard library  there is no cross-platform way to create aware timezones without creating your own timezone class   On Windows  there s win32timezone utcnow    but that s part of pywin32  I would rather suggest to use the pytz library  which has a constantly updated database of most timezones   Working with local timezones can be very tricky  see  Further reading  links below   so you may rather want to use UTC throughout your application  especially for arithmetic operations like calculating the difference between two time points   You can get the current date time like so   import pytz from datetime import datetime datetime utcnow   replace tzinfo pytz utc    Mind that datetime today   and datetime now   return the local time  not the UTC time  so applying  replace tzinfo pytz utc  to them would not be correct   Another nice way to do it is   datetime now pytz utc    which is a bit shorter and does the same     Further reading watching why to prefer UTC in many cases    pytz documentation What Every Developer Should Know About Time     development hints for many real-life use cases The Problem with Time  amp  Timezones - Computerphile     funny  eye-opening explanation about the complexity of working with timezones  video

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pytz is a Python library that allows accurate and cross platform timezone calculations using Python 2 3 or higher   With the stdlib  this is not possible    See a similar question on SO

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Especially for non-UTC timezones   The only timezone that has its own method is timezone utc  but you can fudge a timezone with any UTC offset if you need to by using timedelta  amp  timezone  and forcing it using  replace   In  1   from datetime import datetime  timezone  timedelta  In  2   def force timezone dt  utc offset 0               return dt replace tzinfo timezone timedelta hours utc offset             In  3   dt   datetime 2011 8 15 8 15 12 0   In  4   str dt  Out 4    2011-08-15 08 15 12   In  5   str force timezone dt  -8   Out 5    2011-08-15 08 15 12-08 00    Using timezone timedelta hours n   as the time zone is the real silver bullet here  and it has lots of other useful applications

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In Python 3 2   datetime timezone utc  The standard library makes it much easier to specify UTC as the time zone   gt  gt  gt  import datetime  gt  gt  gt  datetime datetime now datetime timezone utc  datetime datetime 2020  11  27  14  34  34  74823  tzinfo datetime timezone utc   You can also get a datetime that includes the local time offset using astimezone   gt  gt  gt  datetime datetime now datetime timezone utc  astimezone   datetime datetime 2020  11  27  15  34  34  74823  tzinfo datetime timezone datetime timedelta seconds 3600    CET      In Python 3 6   you can shorten the last line to  datetime datetime now   astimezone    If you want a solution that uses only the standard library and that works in both Python 2 and Python 3  see jfs  answer  In Python 3 9   zoneinfo to use the IANA time zone database  In Python 3 9  you can specify particular time zones using the standard library  using zoneinfo  like this   gt  gt  gt  from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo  gt  gt  gt  datetime datetime now ZoneInfo  quot America Los Angeles quot    datetime datetime 2020  11  27  6  34  34  74823  tzinfo zoneinfo ZoneInfo key  America Los Angeles     zoneinfo gets its database of time zones from the operating system  or from the first-party PyPI package tzdata if available

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Here is a solution using a readable timezone and that works with today     from pytz import timezone  datetime now timezone  Europe Berlin    datetime now timezone  Europe Berlin    today     You can list all timezones as follows   import pytz  pytz all timezones pytz common timezones   or

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Use the timezone as shown below for a timezone-aware date time  The default is UTC   from django utils import timezone today   timezone now

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A one-liner using only the standard library works starting with Python 3 3  You can get a local timezone aware datetime object using astimezone  as suggested by johnchen902    from datetime import datetime  timezone  aware local now   datetime now timezone utc  astimezone    print aware local now    2020-03-03 09 51 38 570162 01 00  print repr aware local now     datetime datetime 2020  3  3  9  51  38  570162  tzinfo datetime timezone datetime timedelta 0  3600    CET

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Get the current time  in a specific timezone  import datetime import pytz my date   datetime datetime now pytz timezone  US Pacific     Remember to install pytz first

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Getting a timezone-aware date in utc timezone is enough for date subtraction to work    But if you want a timezone-aware date in your current time zone  tzlocal is the way to go   from tzlocal import get localzone    pip install tzlocal from datetime import datetime datetime now get localzone      PS dateutil has a similar function  dateutil tz tzlocal   But inspite of sharing the name it has a completely different code base  which as noted by J F  Sebastian can give wrong results

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If you get current time and date in python then import date and time pytz package in python after you will get current date and time like as    from datetime import datetime import pytz import time str datetime strftime datetime now pytz utc    Y- m- d  H  M  S t

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Another method to construct time zone aware datetime object representing current time  import datetime import pytz  pytz utc localize  datetime datetime utcnow        You can install pytz from PyPI by running    pipenv install pytz

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Here s a stdlib solution that works on both Python 2 and 3   from datetime import datetime  now   datetime now utc    Timezone-aware datetime utcnow   today   datetime now year  now month  now day  tzinfo utc    Midnight   where today is an aware datetime instance representing the beginning of the day  midnight  in UTC and utc is a tzinfo object  example from the documentation    from datetime import tzinfo  timedelta  ZERO   timedelta 0   class UTC tzinfo       def utcoffset self  dt           return ZERO      def tzname self  dt           return  UTC       def dst self  dt           return ZERO  utc   UTC     Related  performance comparison of several ways to get midnight  start of a day  for a given UTC time  Note  it is more complex  to get midnight for a time zone with a non-fixed UTC offset

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Use dateutil as described in Python datetime datetime now   that is timezone aware   from dateutil tz import tzlocal   Get the current date time with the timezone  now   datetime datetime now tzlocal

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It should be emphasized that since Python 3 6  you only need the standard lib to get a timezone aware datetime object that represents local time  the setting of your OS   Using astimezone   import datetime  datetime datetime 2010  12  25  10  59  astimezone     e g    datetime datetime 2010  12  25  10  59  tzinfo datetime timezone datetime timedelta seconds 3600    Mitteleurop  ische Zeit     datetime datetime 2010  12  25  12  59  astimezone   isoformat     e g     2010-12-25T12 59 00 01 00     I m on CET CEST   see  johnchen902 s comment   Note there s a small caveat though  astimezone None  gives aware datetime  unaware of DST

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Here is one way to generate it with the stdlib   import time from datetime import datetime  FORMAT   Y- m- dT H  M  S z  date datetime strptime time strftime FORMAT  time localtime    FORMAT    date will store the local date and the offset from UTC  not the date at UTC timezone  so you can use this solution if you need to identify which timezone the date is generated at  In this example and in my local timezone   date datetime datetime 2017  8  1  12  15  44  tzinfo datetime timezone datetime timedelta 0  7200     date tzname    UTC 02 00    The key is adding the  z directive to the representation FORMAT  to indicate the UTC offset of the generated time struct  Other representation formats can be consulted in the datetime module docs  If you need the date at the UTC timezone  you can replace time localtime   with time gmtime    date datetime strptime time strftime FORMAT  time gmtime    FORMAT   date     datetime datetime 2017  8  1  10  23  51  tzinfo datetime timezone utc   date tzname    UTC    Edit  This works only on python3  The z directive is not available on python 2  strptime py code

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try pnp datetime  all the time been used and returned is with timezone  and will not cause any offset-naive and offset-aware issues    gt  gt  gt  from pnp datetime pnp datetime import Pnp Datetime  gt  gt  gt   gt  gt  gt  Pnp Datetime utcnow   datetime datetime 2020  6  5  12  26  18  958779  tzinfo  lt UTC gt

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Another alternative  in my mind a better one  is using Pendulum instead of pytz  Consider the following simple code    gt  gt  gt  import pendulum   gt  gt  gt  dt   pendulum now   to iso8601 string    gt  gt  gt  print  dt  2018-03-27T13 59 49 03 00  gt  gt  gt    To install Pendulum and see their documentation  go here  It have tons of options  like simple ISO8601  RFC3339 and many others format support   better performance and tend to yield simpler code

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This one works for me  I first try to get UTC time  and then add or subtract hours according to the timezone you d like to set  today   datetime utcnow

[python] How do I get a value of datetime.today() in Python that is "timezone aware"?

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