Getting timezone from dateutil.parser.parse in Python

Question

Trying to parse the datetime string with timezone info and get the utc offset

from dateutil.parser import parse as parse_date
s = '2017-08-28 06:08:20,488 CDT'
dt = parse_date(s)
print(dt.utcoffset())  # prints `None`

Why is utcoffset returning None rather than -5 as offset?

Spook

Answer 1

From the datetime docs:

If tzinfo is None, returns None

In your code, dt.tzinfo is None, so the timezone information was not parsed by parse_date into the dt. Your datetime dt is "naive" (has no timezone information).

As per the dateutil docs, You can pass your own timezone information to parse_date as either a tzoffset or tzfile:

tzinfos = {"CDT": -21600}
dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20 CDT', tzinfos=tzinfos)
dt.tzinfo #tzoffset('CDT', -21600)

from dateutil import tz
tzinfos = {"CDT": tz.gettz('US/Central')}
dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20 CDT', tzinfos=tzinfos)
dt.tzinfo #tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central')

Or you can encode the timezone offset into the string:

dt = parse_date('2017-08-28 06:08:20-06:00')
dt.tzinfo #tzoffset(None, -21600)

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