How to get current isoformat datetime string including the default timezone?

Question

I need to produce a time string that matches the iso format yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.ssssss-ZO:NE. The now() and utcnow() class methods almost do what I want.

>>> import datetime
>>> #time adjusted for current timezone
>>> datetime.datetime.now().isoformat()
'2010-08-03T03:00:00.000000'
>>> #unadjusted UTC time
>>> datetime.datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
'2010-08-03T10:00:00.000000'
>>>
>>> #How can I do this?
>>> datetime.datetime.magic()
'2010-08-03T10:00:00.000000-07:00'

Answer 1

To get the current time in UTC in Python 3.2+:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timezone
>>> datetime.now(timezone.utc).isoformat()
'2015-01-27T05:57:31.399861+00:00'

To get local time in Python 3.3+:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timezone
>>> datetime.now(timezone.utc).astimezone().isoformat()
'2015-01-27T06:59:17.125448+01:00'

Explanation: datetime.now(timezone.utc) produces a timezone aware datetime object in UTC time. astimezone() then changes the timezone of the datetime object, to the system's locale timezone if called with no arguments. Timezone aware datetime objects then produce the correct ISO format automatically.

Answer 2

You need to make your datetime objects timezone aware. from the datetime docs:

There are two kinds of date and time objects: “naive” and “aware”. This distinction refers to whether the object has any notion of time zone, daylight saving time, or other kind of algorithmic or political time adjustment. Whether a naive datetime object represents Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), local time, or time in some other timezone is purely up to the program, just like it’s up to the program whether a particular number represents metres, miles, or mass. Naive datetime objects are easy to understand and to work with, at the cost of ignoring some aspects of reality.

When you have an aware datetime object, you can use isoformat() and get the output you need.

To make your datetime objects aware, you'll need to subclass tzinfo, like the second example in here, or simpler - use a package that does it for you, like pytz or python-dateutil

Using pytz, this would look like:

import datetime, pytz
datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Central')).isoformat()

You can also control the output format, if you use strftime with the '%z' format directive like

datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Central')).strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%z')