how to get UTC offset value from timezone?

Question

In my Django project, I have a form (forms.py) which implements pytz to get current timezone like this:

tz = timezone.get_current_timezone()

and I have passed this value to a form field as an initial value like this:

timezone = forms.CharField(label='Time Zone', initial=tznow)

which gives the field a default value of current Timezone, in my case, it happens to be Asia/Calcutta.

Now i want to find the UTC Offset value for the given Timezone, which in this case Asia/Calcutta is +5:30

I tried tzinfo() method as well, but i couldn't find the expected result. Can somebody guide me through this?

Answer 1

The UTC offset is given as a timedelta by the utcoffset method of any implementation of tzinfo such as pytz. For example:

import pytz
import datetime

tz = pytz.timezone('Asia/Calcutta')
dt = datetime.datetime.utcnow()

offset_seconds = tz.utcoffset(dt).seconds

offset_hours = offset_seconds / 3600.0

print "{:+d}:{:02d}".format(int(offset_hours), int((offset_hours % 1) * 60))
# +5:30