On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:40 AM, <pandora.ko...@gmail.com> wrote: > Cant it be written more easily as: > date = (datetime.datetime.utcnow(+2) > > i know this is not thhe correct syntax but it just needs a way to add GMT+2 > hours since utc=gmt
I've dithered about whether to open this can of worms or let sleeping dogs lie, and I finally decided to make some metaphor potpourri. Simple UTC offsets are not the same thing as local time. There are a variety of other considerations, but the main one is Daylight Robbery Time, where every government wants to put its own stamp on things by fiddling with the DST rules a bit. Most places will move their clocks an hour forward for summer and then back for winter. But! * Some places are sensible and don't have DST at all (eg Australia/Queensland, America/Arizona) * Northern hemisphere summer corresponds to southern hemisphere winter, and vice versa * Everyone has a different way of defining the boundaries of summer and winter * And just to confuse us all, Irish Standard Time is used in summer, and they *subtract* an hour for winter time! The only way to handle timezones correctly and keep yourself even marginally sane is to hand the job on to somebody else. I dodged the whole issue by letting our Postgres database handle everything for us (date/time formats, timezones, the lot), and having our internal systems all just work in UTC. You'll likely find it easiest to do the same thing with a Python library. Just don't try to pretend to yourself that Greece uses GMT+2, because it's not that simple. For one thing, it's currently summer there... ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
