Get Timezone from City in Python/Django

pytz is a wrapper around IANA Time Zone Database (Olson database). It does not contain data to map an arbitrary city in the world to the timezone it is in.

You might need a geocoder such as geopy that can translate a place (e.g., a city name) to its coordinates (latitude, longitude) using various web-services:

from geopy import geocoders # pip install geopy

g = geocoders.GoogleV3()
place, (lat, lng) = g.geocode('Singapore')
# -> (u'Singapore', (1.352083, 103.819836))

Given city's latitude, longitude, it is possible to find its timezone using tz_world, an efele.net/tz map / a shapefile of the TZ timezones of the world e.g., via postgis timezone db or pytzwhere:

import tzwhere

w = tzwhere()
print w.tzNameAt(1.352083, 103.819836)
# -> Asia/Singapore

There are also web-services that allow to convert (latitude, longitude) into a timezone e.g., askgeo, geonames, see Timezone lookup from latitude longitude.

As @dashesy pointed out in the comment, geopy also can find timezone (since 1.2):

timezone = g.timezone((lat, lng)) # return pytz timezone object
# -> <DstTzInfo 'Asia/Singapore' LMT+6:55:00 STD>

GeoNames also provides offline data that allows to get city's timezone directly from its name e.g.:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
from collections import defaultdict
from datetime import datetime
from urllib   import urlretrieve
from urlparse import urljoin
from zipfile  import ZipFile

import pytz # pip install pytz

geonames_url = 'http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/'
basename = 'cities15000' # all cities with a population > 15000 or capitals
filename = basename + '.zip'

# get file
if not os.path.exists(filename):
    urlretrieve(urljoin(geonames_url, filename), filename)

# parse it
city2tz = defaultdict(set)
with ZipFile(filename) as zf, zf.open(basename + '.txt') as file:
    for line in file:
        fields = line.split(b'\t')
        if fields: # geoname table http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/
            name, asciiname, alternatenames = fields[1:4]
            timezone = fields[-2].decode('utf-8').strip()
            if timezone:
                for city in [name, asciiname] + alternatenames.split(b','):
                    city = city.decode('utf-8').strip()
                    if city:
                        city2tz[city].add(timezone)

print("Number of available city names (with aliases): %d" % len(city2tz))

#
n = sum((len(timezones) > 1) for city, timezones in city2tz.iteritems())
print("")
print("Find number of ambigious city names\n "
      "(that have more than one associated timezone): %d" % n)

#
fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z'
city = "Zurich"
for tzname in city2tz[city]:
    now = datetime.now(pytz.timezone(tzname))
    print("")
    print("%s is in %s timezone" % (city, tzname))
    print("Current time in %s is %s" % (city, now.strftime(fmt)))

Output

Number of available city names (with aliases): 112682

Find number of ambigious city names
 (that have more than one associated timezone): 2318

Zurich is in Europe/Zurich timezone
Current time in Zurich is 2013-05-13 11:36:33 CEST+0200

there have been a lot of possible solutions proposed here and they're all a bit tedious to set up.

To make things quicker for the next person with this problem, I took the one from Will Charlton and made a quick python library out of it: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/whenareyou

from whenareyou import whenareyou
tz = whenareyou('Hamburg')
tz.localize(datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0))

Gets you datetime.datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Berlin' CET+1:00:00 STD>).

This gets you a pytz object (tz in the example) so you can use it pythonicly.

It uses the google API
Leaves daylight savings calculation to pytz, only one call per city, rest happens offline
LRU caches the requests so you shouldn't hit the API limit easily
Should also work with any address or anything google maps understands

I think you're going to need to manually search the timezone database for the city you're looking for:

from pytz import country_timezones, timezone

def find_city(query):
    for country, cities in country_timezones.items():
        for city in cities:
            if query in city:
                yield timezone(city)

for tz in find_city('Zurich'):
    print(tz)

(that's just a quick-and-dirty solution, it for instance doesn't try to match only the city-part of a timezone – try searching for Europe, it does substring matches, doesn't search case-insensitive, etc.)

The idea is to find lat/long coordinates for given city (or state) with one of geopy's geocoders, and get the appropriate time zone from the geocoder. Ex:

from datetime import datetime, timezone
from geopy import geocoders

# get the location by using one of the geocoders.
# GeoNames has a free option.
gn = geopy.geocoders.GeoNames(username='your-account-name')    
loc = gn.geocode("California, USA")

# some geocoders can obtain the time zone directly.
# note: the geopy.timezone object contains a pytz timezone.
loc_tz = gn.reverse_timezone(loc.point)

# EXAMPLE: localize a datetime object
dt_UTC = datetime(2020, 11, 27, 12, 0, 0, tzinfo=timezone.utc)
dt_tz = dt_UTC.astimezone(loc_tz.pytz_timezone)
print(dt_tz, repr(dt_tz))   
# 2020-11-27 04:00:00-08:00 
# datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 4, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/Los_Angeles' PST-1 day, 16:00:00 STD>)

If the geocoder doesn't yield a time zone, you can use timezonefinder to attribute a time zone to given lat/long coordinates.

Get Timezone from City in Python/Django

Output

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