get UTC times from parseDT - trouble with at 9:30 clock times being interpreted directly in UTC

[MatthiasKauer]

Hi,
I have trouble obtaining UTC based data from Calendar.parseDT. I tried making things work by adding sourceTime=datetime.utcnow() and it seemed fine for a while.
Parsing "at 9:30" however leads to 9:30 in UTC without adjusting for the time difference.

Consider the following.

from datetime import datetime
import parsedatetime as pdt
import sys
import pytz

def parse_args(argv=sys.argv):
    cal = pdt.Calendar()
    timestr = ' '.join(argv)
    ret = cal.parseDT(timestr, sourceTime=datetime.utcnow(), tzinfo=pytz.utc)[0]
    print(ret)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parse_args()

Command line:

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py now
2015-06-26 04:57:06+00:00

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py in 10 min
2015-06-26 05:07:10+00:00

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py at 12:50
2015-06-26 12:50:00+00:00

I'd expect (or would like) the last output to be 4:50 UTC. Any advice?

Best regards,
Matthias

[MatthiasKauer]

Ok, I put together a workaround now (or maybe this is how it's intended) with tzlocal and pytz that seems to work.

from datetime import datetime
import parsedatetime as pdt
import sys
import pytz

# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13218506/how-to-get-system-timezone-setting-and-pass-it-to-pytz-timezone
from tzlocal import get_localzone # $ pip install tzlocal
local_tz = get_localzone()

def parse_args(argv=sys.argv):
    cal = pdt.Calendar()
    timestr = ' '.join(argv)
    # ret = cal.parseDT(timestr, sourceTime=datetime.utcnow(), tzinfo=pytz.utc)[0]
    ret = cal.parseDT(timestr, tzinfo=local_tz)[0]
    ret_utc = ret.astimezone(pytz.utc)
    print(ret)
    print(ret_utc)

    ret_loc = ret_utc.astimezone(local_tz)
    print(ret_loc)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parse_args()

Command line:

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py now
2015-06-26 13:09:57+08:00
2015-06-26 05:09:57+00:00
2015-06-26 13:09:57+08:00

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py in 5 min
2015-06-26 13:15:05+08:00
2015-06-26 05:15:05+00:00
2015-06-26 13:15:05+08:00

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py at 9:30
2015-06-26 09:30:00+08:00
2015-06-26 01:30:00+00:00
2015-06-26 09:30:00+08:00

C:\dvl\tim>python pdt_test.py at 13:25
2015-06-26 13:25:00+08:00
2015-06-26 05:25:00+00:00
2015-06-26 13:25:00+08:00

[bear]

Yes, technically this is not-a-bug because parsedatetime doesn't look at or worry about timezones and leaves that to the caller