Question

I’m having trouble getting event start in end times in UTC format from facebook.

I’m using the Facebook Python library, I am running these queries to retrieve events:

fb_events = graph.get_connections(fb_user["id"], "events", args=["date_format=U"])
for item in fb_events['data']:
    curr_event = graph.get_object(item['id'], args=["date_format=U"])

The last line of the code is where I actually get the event containing the start and end times. The arg: "date_format=U" is supposed to specify the time format in unix time, which is already in UTC, however, this code still returns normal Facebook time stamps, in local time.

How can I get this information in UTC time, or in some sort of time that is consistent across time zones?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The following might help you to do the conversion:

import pytz, datetime, time
import os

originalTimeStamp = os.stat("/tmp/file-from-us-west-coast").st_mtime

# prints e.g. 2010-03-31 13:01:18
print "original:",datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(originalTimeStamp)

# re-interpret 
originalTimeZone = "America/Los_Angeles"
targetTimeZone   = "Europe/Paris"

newTimeStamp = pytz.timezone(originalTimeZone).localize(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(originalTimeStamp)).astimezone(pytz.timezone(targetTimeZone))

# prints e.g. 2010-03-31 22:01:18+02:00
print "new:     ",newTimeStamp

# convert back to seconds since epoch
newTimeStamp = time.mktime(newTimeStamp.timetuple())

# print time difference in hours
print (newTimeStamp - originalTimeStamp) / 3600.0

See this link for more information: http://pytz.sourceforge.net/

Another example of the code

from datetime import *
from pytz import timezone
import pytz

[...]

if (not isinstance(pacificTime, int)):
    pacificTime = int(pacificTime)
originalTimeZone = "America/Los_Angeles"
print datetime.fromtimestamp(pacificTime, pytz.timezone(originalTimeZone))