time module question - time zones

[Eric Wertman]

I tend to deal with dates a lot in different formats and places...
typically I'll convert them to a time tuple with strptime(), and pass
them around like that before I need to write them back out.

One set of time/dates I'm getting are in UTC, but the string doesn't
say that specifically.  So I do this..  I had expected the outcome to
be offset properly (I'm EST5EDT).  But I'm obviously missing
something:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import time

utc_str = '2008-05-10 03:05:00 UTC'

d = time.strptime(utc_str,'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z')
t = time.mktime(d)

print d
print time.gmtime(t)
print time.localtime(t)

output :

(2008, 5, 10, 3, 5, 0, 5, 131, 0)
(2008, 5, 10, 8, 5, 0, 5, 131, 0)
(2008, 5, 10, 4, 5, 0, 5, 131, 1)


I believe that I should be getting (2008, 5, 9, 23, 5, 0, 5, 130, 1)
out of one of those, since the original 3:05am time was UTC, and my TZ
is currently -4.  Does that make sense?  I didn't even think I needed
to do any business with time.localtime() and time.gmtime().  I
expected  time.strftime() to return the locale appropriate time, but
it didn't.

TIA

Eric