problem with US time zones

[Fred Drake]

This problem appears to be new as of pytz-2014.3:

>>> datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 11, 17, 3, 5432, pytz.timezone("US/Central")).astimezone(pytz.UTC)
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 17, 8, 3, 5432, tzinfo=<UTC>)
>>> datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 11, 17, 3, 5432, pytz.timezone("US/Eastern")).astimezone(pytz.UTC)
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 16, 13, 3, 5432, tzinfo=<UTC>)

[Fred Drake (fdrake)]

Note in particular that the minute value is changed unexpectedly.

[Stuart Bishop (stub)]

You need to use the pytz API to construct the localized timestamps, per its README

>>> import pytz
>>> central = pytz.timezone('US/Central')
>>> eastern = pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')
>>> import datetime
>>> central.localize(datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 11, 17, 3, 5432)).astimezone(pytz.utc)
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 16, 17, 3, 5432, tzinfo=<UTC>)
>>> eastern.localize(datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 11, 17, 3, 5432)).astimezone(pytz.utc)
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 15, 17, 3, 5432, tzinfo=<UTC>)
>>>

PEP 431 is all about fixing this and making it sane.

[Fred Drake (fdrake)]

Ok; I think I understand the problem now. It's not that the conversion to UTC was a problem, but that the input itself was insane, where the input I was dealing with was:

datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 1, 11, 17, 3, 5432, pytz.timezone("US/Eastern"))

because the resulting datetime value didn't have the right timezone.

Thanks!