Question

Is there an elegant way to display the current time in another time zone?

I would like to have something with the general spirit of:

cur = <Get the current time, perhaps datetime.datetime.now()>
print("Local time   {}".format(cur))
print("Pacific time {}".format(<something like cur.tz('PST')>))
print("Israeli time {}".format(<something like cur.tz('IST')>))

Answer 1

You could use the pytz library:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> import pytz
>>> utc = pytz.utc
>>> utc.zone
'UTC'
>>> eastern = pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')
>>> eastern.zone
'US/Eastern'
>>> amsterdam = pytz.timezone('Europe/Amsterdam')
>>> fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z'

>>> loc_dt = eastern.localize(datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0))
>>> print loc_dt.strftime(fmt)
2002-10-27 06:00:00 EST-0500

>>> ams_dt = loc_dt.astimezone(amsterdam)
>>> ams_dt.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 12:00:00 CET+0100'