To remove a timezone (tzinfo) from a datetime object:
# dt_tz is a datetime.datetime object
dt = dt_tz.replace(tzinfo=None)
If you are using a library like arrow, then you can remove timezone by simply converting an arrow object to to a datetime object, then doing the same thing as the example above.
# <Arrow [2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00]>
arrowObj = arrow.get('2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00')
# datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 10, 56, 9, 347444, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -25200))
tmpDatetime = arrowObj.datetime
# datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 10, 56, 9, 347444)
tmpDatetime = tmpDatetime.replace(tzinfo=None)
Why would you do this? One example is that mysql does not support timezones with its DATETIME type. So using ORM's like sqlalchemy will simply remove the timezone when you give it a datetime.datetime object to insert into the database. The solution is to convert your datetime.datetime object to UTC (so everything in your database is UTC since it can't specify timezone) then either insert it into the database (where the timezone is removed anyway) or remove it yourself. Also note that you cannot compare datetime.datetime objects where one is timezone aware and another is timezone naive.
##############################################################################
# MySQL example! where MySQL doesn't support timezones with its DATETIME type!
##############################################################################
arrowObj = arrow.get('2014-10-09T10:56:09.347444-07:00')
arrowDt = arrowObj.to("utc").datetime
# inserts datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 17, 56, 9, 347444, tzinfo=tzutc())
insertIntoMysqlDatabase(arrowDt)
# returns datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 9, 17, 56, 9, 347444)
dbDatetimeNoTz = getFromMysqlDatabase()
# cannot compare timzeone aware and timezone naive
dbDatetimeNoTz == arrowDt # False, or TypeError on python versions before 3.3
# compare datetimes that are both aware or both naive work however
dbDatetimeNoTz == arrowDt.replace(tzinfo=None) # True
So i have a script that pulls some stuff from Sharepoint. One of the fields is the timestamp that an entry was made into the Sharepoint list. When pulling it from the API it is returned in the following format:
| ENTERED_TM |
|---|
| 2024-02-28T17:48:43Z |
The datatype of this field when returned from the API is Object. I want to drop the time zone stuff so i just have YYYY-MM-DD H:M:S.
I've tried a couple different things:
First I convert it to datetime with cleaned_df["ENTERED_TM"] = pd.to_datetime(cleaned_df["ENTERED_TM"])
Then i've tried 2 ways of dropping the time zone cleaned_df["ENTERED_TM"].dt.tz_convert(None) and cleaned_df["ENTERED_TM"].dt.tz_localize(None)
Both of those leave me this:
| ENTERED_TM |
|---|
| 2024-02-28 17:48:43+00:00 |
Any help would be appreciated
Note that for Python 3.2 onwards, the datetime module contains datetime.timezone. The documentation for datetime.utcnow() says:
An aware current UTC datetime can be obtained by calling
datetime.now(timezone.utc).
So, datetime.utcnow() doesn't set tzinfo to indicate that it is UTC, but datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) does return UTC time with tzinfo set.
So you can do:
>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 10, 2, 43, 55, 230107, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)
Since Python 3.11, there also exists datetime.UTC which is equivalent to datetime.timezone.utc. So you can also do datetime.datetime.now(datetime.UTC).
That means it is timezone naive, so you can't use it with datetime.astimezone
you can give it a timezone like this
import pytz # 3rd party: $ pip install pytz
u = datetime.utcnow()
u = u.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc) #NOTE: it works only with a fixed utc offset
now you can change timezones
print(u.astimezone(pytz.timezone("America/New_York")))
To get the current time in a given timezone, you could pass tzinfo to datetime.now() directly:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
import pytz # $ pip install pytz
print(datetime.now(pytz.timezone("America/New_York")))
It works for any timezone including those that observe daylight saving time (DST) i.e., it works for timezones that may have different utc offsets at different times (non-fixed utc offset). Don't use tz.localize(datetime.now()) -- it may fail during end-of-DST transition when the local time is ambiguous.