How to `strftime` having timezone adjusted?

Question

I store my datetime int UTC like so:

import pytz, datetime

timeUTC = datetime.datetime(2013, 5, 23, 19, 27, 50, 0)
timezoneLocal = pytz.timezone('Europe/Vilnius')

timeLocal = timezoneLocal.localize(timeUTC)

But when I try to print it, it just gives me regular UTC hours

>>> timeLocal.strftime('%H:%M:%S')
'19:27:50'

I would expect this to return '22:27:50' since this is the local time (pytz.timezone('Europe/Vilnius') is +3 at the moment). What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Localize the date string as a UTC datetime, then use astimezone to convert it to the local timezone.

import pytz, datetime

timeUTC = datetime.datetime(2013, 5, 23, 19, 27, 50, 0)
timezoneLocal = pytz.timezone('Europe/Vilnius')
utc = pytz.utc
timeLocal = utc.localize(timeUTC).astimezone(timezoneLocal)
print(timeLocal)
# 2013-05-23 22:27:50+03:00

localize does not convert datetimes, it interprets the date string as though it were written in that timezone. localize builds a timezone-aware datetime out of a naive datetime (such as timeUTC). astimezone converts timezone-aware datetimes to other timezones.