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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list