Treating of time in Emoncms - UTC or BST

[borpin (Brian Orpin)]

@Andybeevers

What are the built in tools for the job?

Treating of time in Emoncms - UTC or BST

Why not use strptime? datetime.datetime.strptime("2007-03-04T21:08:12Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ") (How do I translate an ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object? - Stack Overflow) or even fromisoformat? https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime.fromisoformat Both are untested .

@Andybeevers

So the conclusion is that python ignores the UTC derivation in the time and applies the local timezone and then produces the unixtime.

Not processing Z might still be a bug is a feature Issue 35829: datetime: parse "Z" timezone suffix in fromisoformat() - Python tracker. You need to test it yourself. Potentially simply replace the Z for +00:00 in the string first.

Parse "Z" timezone suffix in datetime

[edit]

datetime.fromisoformat(my_date.replace('Z', '+00:00'))

[edit Nov 2023]
It occurs to me this will create erroneous results if DST is in effect. I think the Z should just be removed so the time is assumed to be local time when converted.