"Python's standard datetime object is broken" about analytics-python HOT 8 CLOSED

Please fix the documentation to not hate on Python datetime objects because of a misunderstanding.

My recommendation would be to update the documentation to provide an example of how to add timezone information, either with pytz, the datetime library itself, or (preferably) both. It's not terribly hard and a little Google search should help you find how to do that appropriately.

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They don't "lose timezone information", whatever that means. You're not giving timezone information to the now() function in the first place. Try this: datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.utc).

Of note, in Python 3 the maintainers added a UTC instance to the standard library (so you don't need pytz just to get UTC zoned datetimes), and support for fixed-offset timezones. This support has also been added to strptime, so if you parse a datetime string with a fixed-time offset and the %z operator you'll get a zoned datetime (in Python 2, %z in strptime is an error):

>>> datetime.strptime("2015-03-15T07:54:13-1045", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 15, 7, 54, 13, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(-1, 47700)))

You still have to use pytz for "named" timezones.

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Or really, just use arrow, which abstract all that stuff, and let you go from and to datetime when you need it.

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Or really, just use arrow, which abstract all that stuff, and let you go from and to datetime when you need it.

Except that's not really what arrow does, it mostly asserts that there's no such thing as a date, a time, or a naive datetime (then adds a bunch of utility methods and handrolls localisation and formatting because apparently the CLDR still isn't a thing)

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Thanks @dwieeb. Completely agree; point well made and very appreciated. @jgershen to accompany your release this sprint, would you mind updating the docs to reflect the proper approach and remove disparaging/embarrassing language? (And close this once it's done?) Thanks!

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Yep, the stuff we had there sure is incorrect & embarrassing; I'll fix the docs. Thanks @dwieeb for bringing it to our attention!

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Updated to remove the wrong language and add a brief description of how naive / aware objects work.

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👍

Thanks, this is great!

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