How can I get a human-readable timezone name in Python?

user_56541 0
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In a Python project I'm working on, I'd like to be able to get a "human-readable" timezone name of the form America/New_York, corresponding to the system local timezone, to display to the user. Every piece of code I've seen that accesses timezone information only returns either a numeric offset (-0400) or a letter code (EDT) or sometimes both. Is there some Python library that can access this information, or if not that, convert the offset/letter code into a human-readable name?

If there's more than one human-readable name corresponding to a particular timezone, either a list of the possible results or any one of them is fine, and if there is no human-readable name corresponding to the current time zone, I'll take either an exception or None or [] or whatever.

A clarification: I don't remember exactly what I had in mind when I originally wrote this question, but I think what I really wanted was a way to turn a timezone into a human-readable name. I don't think this question was meant to focus on how to get the system local timezone specifically, but for the specific use case I had in mind, it just happened that the local timezone was the one I wanted the name for. I'm not editing the bit about the local timezone out of the question because there are answers focusing on both aspects.

timezone python
8 Answers

This may not have been around when this question was originally written, but here is a snippet to get the time zone official designation: 

>>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
>>> eastern.zone
'US/Eastern'

Further, this can be used with a non-naive datetime object (aka a datetime where the actual timezone has been set using pytz.<timezone>.localize(<datetime_object>) or datetime_object.astimezone(pytz.<timezone>) as follows: 

>>> import datetime, pytz
>>> todaynow = datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.timezone('US/Hawaii'))
>>> todaynow.tzinfo # turned into a string, it can be split/parsed
<DstTzInfo 'US/Hawaii' HST-1 day, 14:00:00 STD>
>>> todaynow.strftime("%Z")
'HST'
>>> todaynow.tzinfo.zone
'US/Hawaii'

This is, of course, for the edification of those search engine users who landed here. ... See more at the pytz module site.

user_3254520

# use tzlocal library

from tzlocal import get_localzone

current_timezone = get_localzone()
zone = current_timezone.zone
print(zone)
user_72509420

Working with the latest version of tzlocal which is 4.1 as of today, tzlocal.get_localzone().key produces the following error: AttributeError: '_PytzShimTimezone' object has no attribute 'key'. But tzlocal.get_localzone().zone works lovely.

user_64362790
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