stftime %z time conversion character

[Paul Boddie]

Evan Klitzke wrote:
> Although it is not present in ANSI C, the GNU version of stftime
> supports the conversion character %z, which is a time offset from GMT.
> The four digit time offset is required in RFC 2822 dates/times, and is
> used by a number of other programs as well. I need to convert times
> that use this convention to python time representations, and because
> Python does not support the %z time conversion character I cannot
> simply use the time.strptime function.

See this patch for an idea of the scope of this problem:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=1667546&group_id=5470

> What solutions have people used for this? I'm currently thinking of
> creating a dict that maps four digit time offsets to the time zone
> name and then use the %Z token on that. Is there another (or better)
> way?

Apart from a patch which would allow the time module functions to
produce the output you desire, an alternative might involve the
datetime module and timezone-aware datetime objects:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/9848f3054b4f3eae

I refer indirectly to the pytz module in the above message:

http://pytz.sourceforge.net/

Paul