Question

Totally new to python, I’m actually working on an ex-colleague’s script. in looking at it it seems fairly straight-forward. Here’s the situation:

The script looks at current localtime (UTC) and renders a time-based table that scrolls/changes throughout the day as the hours pass so there’s always a rolling 8 hour table.

The problem is that now we’d like to deploy a copy of this tool (on the same server) in CST (‘America/Chicago’) (meaning I need to change the UTC time to CST) so I’m just trying to find a way to modify what he has to make the ‘current_time’ variable == GMT -6.

He used strftime() to get the first hour:

current_time = int(strftime("%H"))
if current_time <19:
temp_page.write(...)
elif current_time == 19:
temp_page.write(...)

etc.

So – from my php knowledge, I’d love to be able to do something like:

current_time = int(strftime("%H"), (localtime() -6 hours))

(yes, I realize that’s not real php code, but hopefully you get my meaning ;-))

In my research, I’ve come across pytz, but this is not installed on the webserver, though I can probably get it if that’s the best/easiest way too implement it.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could probably use the datetime module (it’s part of the standard library, so it’s installed if a standard python is on the system).

In particular, datetime objects can have an optional tzinfo attribute, used during timezone conversions. Here‘s a blog post that explains step-by-step how to use those.