In Python, I want a Python program to be able to determine the current date and time in NYC . Is that practical? While datetime.datetime.now() can tell me the local time, and datetime.utcnow() can tell me the UTC (GMT). However just looking at the difference will not help me as DST changes.
I try things like "dt=datetime.now() " and "dt.timetuple()"
I get tm_isdst=-1 even if I change the computer date.
I change my computer clock from a January date to a July date. I still get tm_isdst=-1
Why not use pytz? I want the users to not have to go thru the step of downloading an extra library.
I suspect some sort of problems in your use of the datetime, time, etc. modules, but without knowing more, not much help can be provided.
The following suggestion has some definite drawbacks, and I really recommend more pursuit to solving the problems with datetime, etc. However, if you're sure to have a web connection and need to get something done fast, you could query USNO time with something like:
import urllib
f = urllib.urlopen("http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl")
time_page = f.readlines()
for line in time_page:
if line.find("Eastern Time") != -1:
ny_time = line[4:24]
break
print ny_time
The output looks like:
Jan. 19, 05:18:04 PM
This makes use of the fact that NYC is in the Eastern Time zone. Also, it assumes the USNO server is available to your user. Furthermore, it has assumptions about the format of the content returned. I don't know if/how frequently that format changes. Also, if this is going to be used a lot, please find another server, as you don't want to sink the USNO server! (Pun not originally intended, but recognized and kept. :-).
If you are not in the same timezone as NYC, it's in practice impossible without knowing the timezone and when DST changes. You can't hardcode it for NYC, of course, but it is way easier to just install pytz or dateutil, and then you aren't limited to NYC.
Related
In Jinja2, how would you specify a default rendering method for a certain type?
In particular, datetime?
I found it quite annoying when rendering datetime values from Django. They look like 2022-11-04T00:00:00.987654+00:00. What was that T for, and why there was a plus + followed by 00:00. My users who lived on small islands for their entire life wouldn't understand.
Aside from the formatting problem, Django gives UTC time objects. Always UTC, despite the TIME_ZONE in its settings module has been specified with a different value.
I know I can use a filter thing like me.time_of_death|format_datetime. However putting it after every single datetime field sounds insane to me, and I don't want to be woken up in the midnight because of a datetime without that filter released on the previous day.
Is it possible to make it default?
You can use dateparse:
from django.utils import dateparse
Then when before you pass the time to the template you can use the following to convert it to something more understandable to your fellow islanders:
readable_time = dateparse.parse_datetime(CONFUSING_TIME_STRING)
I am developing an application to manage shifts of operation of Internet of Things devices which can be anywhere on the planet using different time zones, I am using python, mongodb and pymongo.
As we all know, when we store a date in mongodb it automatically converts the date of our time zone to UTC by changing the time but keeping the same absolute value below.
The problem I have is that when I query the database to get the date using pymongo I get exactly the same date and time that is stored in mongodb in UTC but in my time zone without having made the conversion change;
for example, Let's suppose I create a datetime in python using the "datetime" library:
MY_TIMEZONE = pytz.timezone('America/Bogota')
datetime.now().astimezone(MY_TIMEZONE)
and I get this date in my time zone:
'2021-02-25 00:00:00-05:00'
look at -05:00 at the end
when I save that date in my mongodb collection in atlas, it transforms the date to UTC which looks like this:
'2021-02-25 05:00:00.000+00:00'
look at +00:00 at the end
So far so good, the problem comes when I query the database to obtain that same date using pymongo method "find_one"
what i get is this:
'2021-02-25 05:00:00-05:00'
look at -05:00 at the end
the same time and date as UTC but in my time zone, which in theory should not happen, I should get the date in UTC or in the local time zone but with the change. That bug can be critical in the system I'm developing.
Does anyone know what could be happening, if it is some kind of bug in the current versions?
I am using python 3.8.5, pymongo 3.11.3 and mongodb 4.4.4
I have looked everywhere about this problem, but it seems that I am the only one that has happened, adding or subtracting the time difference in local is not an option, I guess I will have to choose to use timestamps to avoid this problem or another headache.
If your application is working with multiple time zones, you should configure your system (generally preferable) or your application to use UTC as the time zone.
If you do this, you have two time zones you generally need to keep track of: UTC, which is what every timestamp is stored in, and a local time zone, which is used for output and presentation.
If you don't do this (i.e. your system and/or application time zone is anything other than UTC), you need to keep track of 3 time zones and more than 3 possible combinations of how things can go wrong:
The time zone that your input is in (is it system time zone or the non-system local time?)
When you store a timestamp, is it provided in UTC, system local time or non-system local time?
etc.
If your application is working with a single time zone, AND all of your software is built for this correctly, you can generally assume all times are in local time and ignore time zones.
This last bit isn't always explicitly documented. For example in Ruby, the base driver timezone behavior is described here and it doesn't say that all times are returned in local time zone. Mongoid documentation has a more extensive treatise of time zones, because they are explicitly configurable.
For pymongo I suggest reviewing the entirety of documentation carefully looking for equivalent statements (and make sure you review the bson (de)serialization docs as well), and failing that you might need to read the source code to ascertain behavior.
In any event, working with multiple time zones when your system/application time zone is not UTC is really more difficult than it should be and I don't recommend it (if not for yourself, then whoever will have to work with your code after you).
I recently started using imapclient in order to fetch emails from my Yahoo! account. The program is relatively simple. It is as follows:
yahoo=imap.IMAPClient('imap.mail.yahoo.com', ssl=True)
yahoo.login('myusername', 'mypassword')# cant tell you my username and password, can I?
yahoo.select_folder('Inbox', readonly=True)
# so far, everything is going fine.
yahoo.search(['ON 1-Nov-2015'])
Here's the problem. I've already received tons of messages on November 1st, and the method returns []. It does not work on any date I try. It's as if the 'ON' search doesn't work at all. So I try another method.
yahoo.search(['SINCE 1-Nov-2015'])
No matter how many times I restart the program, less than the actual amount of email UIDs are returned. So I investigate, and I think this may be the problem:
yahoo.fetch(11636, 'BODY[]')
11636 was an email that has a timestamp 10:20 AM, November 1. Instead, the return value says that it was received at 2:20 AM, November 1. I believe this is the problem.
Maybe I am mistaken, and that is the problem. Maybe I am doing something terribly wrong. Either way, any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I used datetime to make it work
import datetime
yahoo.search([u'SINCE', datetime.date(2015, 11, 1)])
Kind of a late answer, sorry for that :/
I think ON and SINCE are probably using UTC, whereas the time zone you see in the header is in (some) local time. Try querying according to UTC and see if you get the results you expect.
I've read a bunch of posts on how flaky parsing time can be. I believe I have come up with a reliable way of converting an ISO8601-formatted timestamp here:
https://gist.github.com/3702066
The most important part being the astimezone(LOCALZONE) call when the date is parsed. This allowed time.mktime() to do the right thing and appears to handle daylight savings properly.
Are there obvious gotchas I've missed?
Your code does seem to work even for times that fall just before or just after daylight savings time transitions, but I am afraid it might still fail on those rare occasions when a location's timezone offset actually changes. I don't have an example to test with though.
So even if if does work (or almost always work), I think it's crazy to convert a UTC time string to a UTC timestamp in a manner which involves or passed through local time in any way. The local time zone should be irrelevant. It's an unwanted dependency. I'm not saying that you're crazy. You're just trying to work with the APIs you are given, and the C library's time APIs are badly designed.
Luckily, Python provides an alternative to mktime() that is what the C library should have provided: calendar.timegm(). With this function, I can rewrite your function like this:
parsed = parse_date(timestamp)
timetuple = parsed.timetuple()
return calendar.timegm(timetuple)
Because local time is not involved, this also removes the dependency on pytz and the nagging doubt that an obscure artifact of somebody's local timezone will cause an unwanted effect.
I'm working on making a small ban system, and the snippet below will tell the client how much time of their ban is remaining.
The problem:
When you call Bans.timeleft_str(), rather then showing something less then a day, it will show the timestamp + 18 hours.
Snippet: http://pastebin.com/Zumn0tLv
This problem occurs if I change self.length = WEEK, etc. Rather then 7d 00h 00m, it will be 7d 18h 00m.
I originally tested this on my ubuntu vbox, and then tried it on my windows python shell, and still got the same result.
You may need to change self.timestamp to a time in the past.
Thanks in advance.
time.time, as the docs I just pointed to say, works in UTC (once known as "Greenwich" time, now "universal time coordinate"). mktime, again as said in its docs, takes as argument
9-tuple [...] which expresses the time in local time, not UTC.
strptime may work either way (but you're not supplying a timezone, so it's going to use local time).
So, overall, you're getting deep into timezone confusion;-).
I recommend (as always) that you standardize on UTC (the local timezone of your server can well not be the same as that of its users, after all), e.g. with a %Z directive in the format you pass to strptime and a corresponding timezone of 'UTC' (which is guaranteed to be recognized on all platforms) in the corresponding part of the string you're parsing.