I’m trying to wrap my head in understanding the implication of using .utcnow vs .now on Python’s datetime.
Here’s the reason of my confusion: I live in France. Right now, we have a +1 hour on the UTC timezone (CET timezone in winter (now) / CEST (+2) timezone in summer).
If I take the following value :
dt = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
dt.strftime('%c') # Thu Dec 9 16:17:38 2021
int(dt.timestamp()) # 1639063064
This is correct as it is, in France right now, 17h17.
So, from my understanding, that timestamp, 1639063064 is the UTC representation of the time since EPOCH.
But if I test this value in the website Epoch Converter, I get
- GMT: Thursday 9 December 2021 15:17:44
- Your time zone: jeudi 9 décembre 2021 16:17:44 GMT+01:00
It seems that the website ALSO substract my timezone to an already "substracted" value, ending in removing twice the timezone and causing an invalid value.
The real confusion is when I tried to import that UTC timestamp to Luxon on my front app, doing the following doesn’t work :
DateTime.fromMillis(parseInt(ts), { zone: 'utc' }).toLocal().setLocale('en')
I’m one hour behind.
How can I "tell" Luxon that the current TS is in the UTC timezone, and calling toLocal will apply the proper user’s timezone ?
>Solution :
It seems that the website ALSO substract my timezone t
No, epochconverter.com isn’t doing anything. The value 1639063064 really does represent 2021-12-09T15:17:44Z. That’s not the value you want.
I’m no Python expert, but I believe the problem is the combination of this utcnow() behavior (emphasis mine):
Return the current UTC date and time, with
tzinfo None.This is like
now(), but returns the current UTC date and time, as a naive datetime object.
And this timestamp() behavior:
Naive datetime instances are assumed to represent local time and this method relies on the platform C
mktime()function to perform the conversion.
It sounds like you want to follow this advice:
An aware current UTC datetime can be obtained by calling
datetime.now(timezone.utc).
So just change your first line to:
dt = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
… and it should be okay.