pythondatetimetimezonepytz

Python's America/New_York time offset showing -04:56

I'm currently using Python 3.9.6 and have this simple code

import datetime
import pytz

est = pytz.timezone('America/New_York')
myDateTime = datetime.datetime(year=2024, month=8, day=15, hour=17, minute=00, tzinfo=est)
print("America/New_York: ", myDateTime.isoformat())
print("UTC:              ", myDateTime.astimezone(pytz.utc).isoformat())

which give the result

America/New_York:  2024-08-15T17:00:00-04:56
UTC:               2024-08-15T21:56:00+00:00

Currently in New York it's Daylight Savings time. So I expected America/New_York to show time offset of -04:00, but it's showing -4:56. I'm wondering if anyone has an explanation for this.

Solution

  • Try like this:

    import datetime  
import pytz  

est = pytz.timezone('America/New_York')  


    naive_datetime = datetime.datetime(year=2024, month=8, day=15, hour=17, minute=0)  
    
    # Localize it to the Eastern timezone  
    myDateTime = est.localize(naive_datetime)  
    
    print("America/New_York: ", myDateTime.isoformat())  
    print("UTC:              ", myDateTime.astimezone(pytz.utc).isoformat())

    When you create a datetime object with the tzinfo parameter like this:

    myDateTime = datetime.datetime(year=2024, month=8, day=15, hour=17, minute=0, tzinfo=est)