Time-zone-aware datetime
Python datetimes are usually naive, which means they don't know which time zone they refer to. This can be a major problem because, given a datetime, it's impossible to know when it actually refers to.
The most common error in working with dates in Python is trying to get the current datetime through datetime.datetime.now(), as all datetime methods work with naive dates, it's impossible to know which time that value represents.
How to do it...
Perform the following steps for this recipe:
- The only reliable way to retrieve the current datetime is by using
datetime.datetime.utcnow(). Independently of where the user is and how the system is configured, it will always return the UTC time. So we need to make it time-zone-aware to be able to decline it to any time zone in the world:
import datetime
def now():
return datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)- Once we have a time-zone-aware current time, it is possible to convert it to any other time...
