Convert Naive Datetime to Timezone aware in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to convert naive date-time to timezone aware in Python.

Let’s go over a few ways we can make date-time objects time zone aware.

What is datetime object?

Datetime is the name of one of the module within python and one of the other classes within the module.

It is an instance that represents a single point in time.
In order to get immediate datetime details, we use now method. It returns the details of time of the moment when now was called.

import datetime
datetime.datetime.now()

Output:

datetime.datetime(2019, 10, 30, 19, 9, 31, 900482)

Formatting datetime objects

Here we will learn about extracting attributes and writing different formats of date.
The occasions where we want to display datetime object in a certain way, we use strftime method.
Let us, understand it with examples,

d = datetime.datetime(2019, 10, 30, 20, 15)

d.strftime("%Y/%m/%d")
> '2019/10/30'

d.strftime("%d %b %y")
> '30 Oct 19'

d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
> '2019-10-30 20:15:00'

Naive v/s Aware in Python

So far, we have only seen formatting datetime objects. That means the object is naive to any sort of time zones.

Timezone’s offset: how many hours the timezone is from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Hence, a datetime object can either be naive offset or aware offset.

Generally, a  naive timezone object does not contain any information about timezone.  In order to check that we use, tzinfo.

import datetime

naive = datetime.datetime.now()
print(naive.tzinfo)

Output:

> None

To make a datetime object offset aware,  we can use pytz library.

import datetime
import pytz

d = datetime.datetime.now()
timezone = pytz.timezone("US/Pacific")
d_aware = timezone.localize(d)
d_aware.tzinfo

Output: 

<DstTzInfo 'US/Pacific' PDT-1 day, 17:00:00 DST>

Converting Time-Zones

We import timezone package from pytz library.

from datetime import datetime
from pytz import timezone

date = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z"

# Current time in UTC
now_utc = datetime.now(timezone('UTC'))
print(now_utc.strftime(date))

# Convert to US/Pacific time zone
now_pacific = now_utc.astimezone(timezone('US/Pacific'))
print(now_pacific.strftime(date))

Output: 

2019-10-31 01:15:33 UTC+0000
2019-10-30 18:15:33 PDT-0700

Here we get our standard time in UTC and later gets converted to US/Pacific timezone.

Also read,

• Slots in Python
• Image processing in Python