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I have datestrings that look like this: '2015-03-02T10:00:00Z'. On my local machine, dateutil.parser.parse() yields datetime objects with timezone UTC, as I would expect. But in a different environment (when I deploy to iron.io), it parses the same strings and gives the resulting datetimes tzlocal() as their tzinfo.

Is there a known reason that should ever happen? Why would environment affect how that Z is parsed?

(both environments should be Python 2.7)

tscizzle
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  • FYI: [ISO 8601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601) & [RFC 3339](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339) describe this *very* common standardized format. `Z` is *explicitly* UTC, so if an environment doesn't honor that, then there is either a bug in your code or theirs. – Matt Johnson-Pint Oct 13 '15 at 18:13
  • Provide the input time string that leads to `tzlocal()`. `'2015-03-02T10:00:00Z'` is UTC time: [there is no room for interpretation](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339#section-5.6) – jfs Oct 14 '15 at 07:01

1 Answers1

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I see that this question is old, but I was just having a similar issue. In my case, I discovered that, for some reason, if the current time zone is UTC, when I parse a string like "2017-02-23T06:54:00Z", the resulting datetime has tzinfo=tzlocal(); while for other timezones the resulting datetime has tzinfo=tzutc() as expected.

In [1]: import time, os

In [2]: from dateutil import parser

In [3]: time.tzname, time.timezone
Out[3]: (('EST', 'EDT'), 18000)

In [4]: parser.parse("2017-02-23T06:54:00Z")
Out[4]: datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 23, 6, 54, tzinfo=tzutc())

In [5]: os.environ['TZ'] = 'UTC'

In [6]: time.tzset()

In [7]: time.tzname, time.timezone
Out[7]: (('UTC', 'UTC'), 0)

In [8]: parser.parse("2017-02-23T06:54:00Z")
Out[8]: datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 23, 6, 54, tzinfo=tzlocal())
Leif Halldor Asgeirsson
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