Pendulum VS pytz

I did the same with datetime and moved to using Pendulum.

Python could be better but really, does any language handle date and time types well? After 30+ years of this I mostly just use seconds since epoch everywhere like some sort of caveman banging rocks together. But at least it works clearly.

Last I looked Pendulum was the best choice for a fancy but humane Python library for dates and times. Install size is over 4MB :-( https://pendulum.eustace.io/

Good luck with your library, but for everyone else I’ll leave this here: https://pendulum.eustace.io/

Pendulum is quite good[0]. Relatively intuitive interface.

When I left Rails, this is one area I really missed.

Time.use_zone("Singapore") { (Time.zone.now - 3.days).beginning_of_week }

This readable line in datetime utils or even pendulum, is such a pain.

[0] https://github.com/sdispater/pendulum

You shouldn't do manual date and time calculations, there are people dedicated to developing tools for that and they're giving those tools for free! An example, Pendulum for Python.

Yes, the datetime api once timezone is involved is quite bad in python.

This is why for anything that uses timezone, I use pendulum: https://pendulum.eustace.io/

It's compatible with the datetime api, but it has sane default, nice tools to convert between timezone, some cool date adjustment stuff, and can humanize time in several languages.

Basically, datetime has the same problem as text vs raw bytes in python 2.7, except it has never been fixed.

Bless you for using the stock library but Pendulum is a much more humane way to work with dates and times in Python.

Also, check the docs here if you're open to an alternative: https://pendulum.eustace.io/

Use Pendulum. It makes converting, adding and subtracting times trivially simple.

Well, pytz actually is technically flawed at the moment because it cannot read TZif Version 2+ files, so it breaks for dates >2038 (and it would break if you tried to point it at system data generated with zic's "slim" mode), see this: https://github.com/stub42/pytz/issues/48

But you are right that pandas' use of pytz is benign and as far as I know doesn't suffer the same usability issues.

If I understand this correctly from the documentation, pytz (or rather the tz database for which the library provides an interface) accounts for political shifts/changes in time zone data / DST.