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Asked: 2026-06-17T15:59:46+00:00

I have working code. My question is why does this work? #04/13/05 2:30pm EDT

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I have working code. My question is why does this work?

#"04/13/05 2:30pm EDT" <- original date string
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from pytz import timezone
import pytz
import time

T= time.struct_time((2005,4,13,14,30,0,0,0,1))
t = time.mktime(T)

print(t)

this prints 

1113417000,

which according to an online converter, http://www.epochconverter.com/, prints

Your time zone: 4/13/2005 2:30:00 PM GMT-4

which is correct. My question is, how does it know the time was in EDT which is GMT-4? The last of the 9-tuple is “dst flag”, but there are numerous timezones where DST is used. So how does it detect the correct timezone?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It asks your operating system for that information, by way of the stdlib C time functions.

    To quote the time module documentation:

    Most of the functions defined in this module call platform C library functions with the same name. It may sometimes be helpful to consult the platform documentation, because the semantics of these functions varies among platforms.

    You can pass in a -1 for the DST flag to have the library set it for you, see time.struct_time. On my Mac OS X 10.7.5 setup, configured for the Europe/Oslo timezone, that gives me:

    >>> import time
>>> time.mktime((2005,4,13,14,30,0,0,0,-1))
1113395400.0

    or, as ‘translated’ by epochconverter:

    Your time zone: 4/13/2005 2:30:00 PM GMT+2
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