times 0.7
Times is a small, minimalistic, Python library for dealing with time conversions between universal time and arbitrary timezones.
License: BSD

**NOTE:**  
This library will not be maintained any further.  **You probably want to use
the excellent [Arrow](http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/) library.**


> “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”

In fact, version 0.7 of times has been rewritten to be implemented on top of
Arrow, so it still provides the Times interface, but you'll already be using
Arrow.  You can probably easily replace your times function calls by Arrow
objects.

---

Times
=====

Build status:
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Times is a small, minimalistic, Python library for dealing with time
conversions to and from timezones, for once and for all.


Accepting time
--------------

Never work with _local_ times.  Whenever you must accept local time input (e.g.
from a user), convert it to universal time immediately:

```pycon
>>> times.to_universal(local_time, 'Europe/Amsterdam')
datetime.datetime(2012, 2, 1, 10, 31, 45, 781262)
```

The second argument can be a `pytz.timezone` instance, or a timezone string.

If the `local_time` variable already holds timezone info, you _must_ leave out
the source timezone from the call.

To enforce best practices, `times` will never implicitly convert times for you,
even if that would technically be possible.


Date Strings
------------
If you want to accepting datetime representations in string form (for example,
from JSON APIs), you can convert them to universal datetimes easily:

```pycon
>>> import time, times
>>> print times.to_universal('2012-02-03 11:59:03-0500')   # auto-detects source timezone
```

`Times` utilizes the string parsing routines available in [dateutil][1].  Note
that the source timezone is auto-detected from the string.  If the string
contains a timezone offset, you are not allowed to explicitly specify one.

If the string does not contain any timezone offset, you _must_ specify the
source timezone explicitly:

```pycon
>>> print times.to_universal('2012-02-03 11:59:03', 'Europe/Amsterdam')
```

This is the inverse of `times.format()`.


POSIX timestamps
----------------
If you prefer working with UNIX (POSIX) timestamps, you can convert them to
safe datetime representations easily:

```pycon
>>> import time, times
>>> print times.to_universal(time.time())
2012-02-03 11:59:03.588419
```

Note that `to_universal` auto-detects that you give it a UNIX timestamp.

To get the UNIX timestamp representation of a universal datetime, use:

```pycon
>>> print times.to_unix(universal_time)
```


Current time
------------

When you want to record the current time, you can use this convenience method:

```pycon
>>> import times
>>> print times.now()
datetime.datetime(2012, 2, 1, 11, 51, 27, 621491)
```


Presenting times
----------------

To _present_ times to the end user of your software, you should explicitly
format your universal time to your user's local timezone.

```pycon
>>> import times
>>> now = times.now()
>>> print times.format(now, 'CET')
2012-02-01 21:32:10+0100
```

As with the `to_universal` function, the second argument may be either
a timezone instance or a timezone string.

**Note**: It _is_ possible to convert universal times to local times, using
`to_local`).  However, you probably shouldn't do it, unless you want to
`strftime()` the resulting local date multiple times.  In any other case, you
are advised to use `times.format()` directly instead.

[1]: http://labix.org/python-dateutil#head-c0e81a473b647dfa787dc11e8c69557ec2c3ecd2