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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T06:00:28+00:00

Apologies for asking too basic question but I couldn’t get it cleared after reading

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Apologies for asking too basic question but I couldn’t get it cleared after reading docs. It just seems that I am missing or have misunderstood something too basic here.

Does calling time.time() from different timezones, at the same time produce different results? This maybe comes down to definition of epoch, which on the docs (and on my not-so-deep search on the Internet), has no mentions of the timezone.

Also, suppose time.time() has been called from places with different timezones, and converted to UTC datetimes on their machines, will they all give same UTC time?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, time.time() returns the number of seconds since an unspecified epoch. Note that on most systems, this does not include leap seconds, although it is possible to configure your system clock to include them. On cpython, time.time is implemented as a call to the C function time, which per §27.23.2.4.2 of the C standard does not have to use a specified epoch:

    The time function determines the current calendar time. The encoding of the value is
    unspecified.

    On virtually every OS (including Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, and all other Unixes), the epoch is 1970-1-1, 00:00 UTC, and on these systems time.time is timezone-independent.

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