How can I force pytz to use currently standard timezones?

Question

Consider the following:

from datetime import datetime

import pytz


new_years_in_new_york = datetime(
    year=2020,
    month=1, 
    day=1,
    hour=0,
    minute=0,
    tzinfo = pytz.timezone('US/Eastern'))

I now I have a datetime object representing January 1, midnight, in New York. Oddly, if I use pytz to convert this to UTC, I'll get an odd datetime off by several minutes:

new_years_in_new_york.astimezone(pytz.utc)
# datetime.datetime(2020, 1, 1, 4, 56, tzinfo=<UTC>)

Notice that midnight in New York, in pytz, is 4:56 in UTC. Elsewhere on Stack Overflow, I learned that's because pytz uses your /usr/share/zoneinfo data, which uses local mean time to account for timezones before standardization. This can be shown here:

pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')
# <DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' LMT-1 day, 19:04:00 STD>

See that LMK-1 day, 19:04:00 STD? That's a local mean time offset, not the offset I want, which is US/Eastern not during daylight savings time.

Is there a way I can force pytz to use what is currently the standard set of offsets based on a current date? On New Years 2020, it should just be UTC-5. If the date I supplied were during daylight savings time, I would want UTC-4. I'm confused as to why pytz would use a LMT-based offset for a 2020 date.

Answer 1

>>> new_years_in_new_york
datetime.datetime(2020, 1, 1, 0, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' LMT-1 day, 19:04:00 STD>)

Notice the odd offset in that datetime. You're not creating this datetime correctly.

This library only supports two ways of building a localized time. The first is to use the localize() method provided by the pytz library. This is used to localize a naive datetime (datetime with no timezone information):

>>> loc_dt = eastern.localize(datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0))
>>> print(loc_dt.strftime(fmt))
2002-10-27 06:00:00 EST-0500

The second way of building a localized time is by converting an existing localized time using the standard astimezone() method:

>>> ams_dt = loc_dt.astimezone(amsterdam)
>>> ams_dt.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 12:00:00 CET+0100'

Unfortunately using the tzinfo argument of the standard datetime constructors ‘’does not work’’ with pytz for many timezones.

>>> datetime(2002, 10, 27, 12, 0, 0, tzinfo=amsterdam).strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 12:00:00 LMT+0020'

http://pytz.sourceforge.net/#localized-times-and-date-arithmetic