Handling timezone is quite a pain in Python. When you create or read a datetime object, you need to make sure whether the datetime you need should be timezone aware or not.

Here is a simple example to create a datetime with timezone. The tzlocal will determine the timezone setting of the operating system and apply it to your datetime object.

import datetime
from dateutil.tz import tzlocal
 
now_without_tz = datetime.datetime.now()
now_with_tz    = datetime.datetime.now(tzlocal())

str1 = now_without_tz.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z')
str2 = now_with_tz.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z')
 
print 'Without Timzone : %s' % (str1)
print 'With Timezone   : %s' % (str2)

Check it out.

 

Done =)

References:

• Joe’s Blog – Python datetime.datetime.now() that is timezone aware
• Labix – python-dateutil#tzlocal_type