Time zones

!!! quote "Tom Scott"

You really should never, ever deal with time zones if you can help it.

The Datetime datatype can have a time zone associated with it. Examples of valid time zones are:

• None: no time zone, also known as "time zone naive";
• UTC: Coordinated Universal Time;
• Asia/Kathmandu: time zone in "area/location" format. See the list of tz database time zones to see what's available;
• +01:00: fixed offsets. May be useful when parsing, but you almost certainly want the "Area/Location" format above instead as it will deal with irregularities such as DST (Daylight Saving Time) for you.

Note that, because a Datetime can only have a single time zone, it is impossible to have a column with multiple time zones. If you are parsing data with multiple offsets, you may want to pass utc=True to convert them all to a common time zone (UTC), see parsing dates and times.

The main methods for setting and converting between time zones are:

• dt.convert_time_zone: convert from one time zone to another;
• dt.replace_time_zone: set/unset/change time zone;

Let's look at some examples of common operations:

{{code_block('user-guide/transformations/time-series/timezones','example',['strptime','replace_time_zone'])}}

--8<-- "python/user-guide/transformations/time-series/timezones.py:setup"
--8<-- "python/user-guide/transformations/time-series/timezones.py:example"

{{code_block('user-guide/transformations/time-series/timezones','example2',['convert_time_zone','replace_time_zone'])}}

--8<-- "python/user-guide/transformations/time-series/timezones.py:example2"