Python: Given the current time in UTC, how do you determine the start and end time of the day in a particular timezone?

I'm playing around with Google App Engine and I learned that the timezone is fixed to UTC. I want to determine the start and end time of the current day for the user's local timezone. So basically, given the current time in UTC, how do you determine the start and end time of the current day, taking into account daylight savings changeovers.

I have some clunky example code. Please note that开发者_JS百科 I realise that if I'm manually specifying a date, I could specify tomorrow's date as well, but they are examples and I want to determinte it programatically. My main problem is that if I add a timedelta to a datetime with a timezone and then normalise it (like it is suggested in the pytz docs) I get a datetime which is an hour off during daylight savings switchovers.

Not mentioned in the code, but ultimately the aim is to convert these times back to UTC which is why it's important to be timezone aware.

#!/usr/bin/python

import datetime
from pytz.gae import pytz

hobart_tz = pytz.timezone('Australia/Hobart')

utc_dt = pytz.utc.localize(datetime.datetime.utcnow())
hobart_dt = utc_dt.astimezone(hobart_tz)

# create a new datetime for the start of the day and add a day to it to get tomorrow.
today_start = datetime.datetime(hobart_dt.year, hobart_dt.month, hobart_dt.day)
today_start = hobart_tz.localize(today_start)
today_end = hobart_tz.normalize(today_start + datetime.timedelta(days=1))
print 'today:', today_start
print ' next:', today_end
print
# gives:
# today: 2011-08-28 00:00:00+10:00
# next: 2011-08-29 00:00:00+10:00

# but say today is a daylight savings changeover.
# after normalisation, we are off by an hour.

dst_finish_2011 = datetime.datetime(2011, 4, 3)  # this would come from hobart_dt
dst_finish_2011 = hobart_tz.localize(dst_finish_2011)
next = hobart_tz.normalize(dst_finish_2011 + datetime.timedelta(days=1))
print '2011-04-03:', dst_finish_2011
print '2011-04-04:', next   # expect 2011-04-04 00:00:00+10:00
print
# gives
# 2011-04-03: 2011-04-03 00:00:00+11:00
# 2011-04-04: 2011-04-03 23:00:00+10:00 (wrong)

dst_start_2011 = datetime.datetime(2011, 10, 2)  # this would come from hobart_dt
dst_start_2011 = hobart_tz.localize(dst_start_2011)
next = hobart_tz.normalize(dst_start_2011 + datetime.timedelta(days=1))
print '2011-10-02:', dst_start_2011
print '2011-10-03:', next   # expect 2011-10-03 00:00:00+11:00
print
# gives
# 2011-10-02: 2011-10-02 00:00:00+10:00
# 2011-10-03: 2011-10-03 01:00:00+11:00 (wrong)

# I guess we could ignore the timezone and localise *after* ?

dst_finish_2011 = datetime.datetime(2011, 4, 3)  # this would come from hobart_dt
next = dst_finish_2011 + datetime.timedelta(days=1)
# now localise
dst_finish_2011 = hobart_tz.localize(dst_finish_2011)
next = hobart_tz.localize(next)
print '2011-04-03:', dst_finish_2011
print '2011-04-04:', next   # expect 2011-04-04 00:00:00+10:00
print
# gives
# 2011-04-03: 2011-04-03 00:00:00+11:00
# 2011-04-04: 2011-04-04 00:00:00+10:00

To find out the start time of the day (midnight) and the end time of the day (tomorrow) in the local timezone, knowing UTC time:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime, time, timedelta
import pytz # $ pip install pytz
from tzlocal import get_localzone # $ pip install tzlocal

tz = get_localzone() # get the local timezone as pytz.timezone
now = datetime.now(pytz.utc) # some UTC time
dt = now.astimezone(tz) # the same time in the local timezone
today = dt.date() # today in the local timezone (naive date object)
midnight = datetime.combine(today, time()) # midnight in the local timezone
aware_midnight = tz.localize(midnight, is_dst=None) # raise exception
                                                    # for ambiguous or
                                                    # non-existing
                                                    # times
tomorrow = midnight + timedelta(1)
aware_tomorrow = tz.localize(tomorrow, is_dst=None)

def print_time(aware_dt, fmt="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z"):
    print(aware_dt.strftime(fmt))
    utc_dt = aware_dt.astimezone(pytz.utc) # the same time in UTC
    print(utc_dt.strftime(fmt))

print_time(aware_midnight)
print_time(aware_tomorrow)

Output

2014-09-01 00:00:00 EST+1000
2014-08-31 14:00:00 UTC+0000
2014-09-02 00:00:00 EST+1000
2014-09-01 14:00:00 UTC+0000

See also,

• How do I get the UTC time of “midnight” for a given timezone? -- only midnight (no tomorrow)
• How can I subtract a day from a python date? -- about the difference between a day ago and yesterday
• python - datetime with timezone to epoch -- demonstrate how easy it is to produce a wrong answer (for some dates, timezones).

I believe you are getting this result because you are adding one day instead of 86400 seconds. There is no uniform, always-correct equivalence between days and seconds. For example, if pytz were to force one day to "really" be 86400 seconds, then adding one day to a December 31 or June 30 date would sometimes cause the seconds field of the result to be "one second off", because in some years those days have had 86401 seconds. (It is possible they could have 86402 or even 86399 seconds in the future.)

So adding one day is taken to mean simply incrementing the day by one, carrying over to month and year if necessary, but without changing the time-of-day fields. Try adding 86400 seconds and see if you get the desired result.

After a little experimentation and thinking I believe I have a solution for you. My previous answer was not correct as you pointed out; a timedelta object for days=1 is basically the same as for seconds=86400 (except where leap seconds are concerned).

One way, the way I would recommend, to increment the date without regards to the time of day is to use a datetime.date object instead of a datetime.datetime object:

>>> oneday = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
>>> d = datetime.date(2011,4,3)
>>> str(d + oneday)
'2011-04-04'

The time of day could then be added to form a complete datetime.datetime object in which you know the time of day fields are unaltered from your original value.

Another method, one which I would feel safe using, is to work with "naive" dates temporarily. This way there is no time zone policy to apply while adding the timedelta.

>>> hob = pytz.timezone('Australia/Hobart')
>>> dstlast = datetime.datetime(2011,4,3)
>>> str(dstlast)
'2011-04-03 00:00:00'
>>> dstlasthob = hob.localize(dstlast)
>>> str(dstlasthob)
'2011-04-03 00:00:00+11:00'
>>> oneday = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
>>> str(hob.normalize(dstlasthob + oneday))
'2011-04-03 23:00:00+10:00'
>>> nextday = hob.localize(dstlasthob.replace(tzinfo=None) + oneday)
>>> str(nextday)
'2011-04-04 00:00:00+10:00'

I tested this method for dates that have leap seconds in them (one example is 2008-12-31) and the result has time of day 00:00:00. Which may actually be wrong, I'm not sure, but it is what you want :-)

The following code tries to get a time of midnight; if the time zone adjustment makes it fail, it readjusts back to midnight with the new zone offset.

def DayStartEnd(localized_dt):
    tz = localized_dt.tzinfo
    start = tz.normalize(datetime.datetime(localized_dt.year,localized_dt.month,localized_dt.day,0,0,0,0,tz))
    after_midnight = start.hour*60*60 + start.minute*60 + start.second
    if start.day != localized_dt.day:
        start += datetime.timedelta(seconds = 24*60*60 - after_midnight)
    elif after_midnight != 0:
        start -= datetime.timedelta(seconds = after_midnight)
    end = tz.normalize(start + datetime.timedelta(hours=24))
    after_midnight = end.hour*60*60 + end.minute*60 + end.second
    if end.day == localized_dt.day:
        end += datetime.timedelta(seconds = 24*60*60 - after_midnight)
    elif after_midnight != 0:
        end -= datetime.timedelta(seconds = after_midnight)
    return start,end

>>> hobart_tz = pytz.timezone('Australia/Hobart')
>>> dst_finish_2011 = datetime.datetime(2011, 4, 3)
>>> dst_finish_2011 = hobart_tz.localize(dst_finish_2011)
>>> start,end = DayStartEnd(dst_finish_2011)
>>> print start,end
2011-04-03 00:00:00+11:00 2011-04-04 00:00:00+10:00
>>> dst_start_2011 = datetime.datetime(2011, 10, 2)
>>> dst_start_2011 = hobart_tz.localize(dst_start_2011)
>>> start,end = DayStartEnd(dst_start_2011)
>>> print start,end
2011-10-02 00:00:00+10:00 2011-10-03 00:00:00+11:00