Question

Is there a built-in library or does anyone have available a function to convert a string timezone such as “America/New_York” to a datetime.tzinfo object?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, you need the pytz library:

import datetime, pytz
zoneName = 'America/New_York'
now = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone(zoneName))

returns:

datetime.datetime(2011, 3, 16, 1, 39, 33, 87375, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/New_York' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)