Small Timezone Code Snippet

Today, I was looking at how to adjust a time stamp from a log file without a timezone info to contain the local timezone, so I can stuff a timezone aware value into a database. It turns out that this is a somewhat under-polished part of the Python standard library, at least as of Python 2.6, which I am using (don't ask why). While looking for a solution, I frequently came across code that used pytz , but I wanted something that would stay within the standard library.

So here's my hodgepodge solution to the problem, which should work in most of Europe:

import time

def getTimeOffset():
    offset = time.timezone
    if bool(time.localtime().tm_isdst):
        offset = offset - 3600
    stz = "%+02.2d%02d" % (offset / 3600, offset % 3600)
    return stz

This approach is a straightforward extension of the idea presented here.