How to add timezone and day light saving info into google protobuf Timestamp?

Question

I'm using google protobuf timestamp for recording purpose in python, however, when I compare the timestamp, I would need to know the timezone and day light saving information associated with every timestamp. Is there any good way to do that? Thanks!

Answer 1

Timestamp's represent "point in time independent of any time zone or calendar".

Many of the languages that implement Protobufs also provide an implementation for Timestamp (e.g. Go's `timestamppb') that includes language-specific methods to convert to/from the language's datetimes and these can be then be used for language-specific time comparisons etc.

Worst case (if you can't use the language-specific implementations described above), you can compare the Timestamp's seconds and then nanoseconds values to order (e.g. before|after).

The documentation provides a Python example (see "Example 5").

Alternatively:

from google.protobuf.timestamp_pb2 import Timestamp

import datetime

dt = datetime.datetime.utcnow()

ts = Timestamp()
ts.FromDatetime(dt)

print(ts)
print(ts.ToDatetime())
print(ts.ToJsonString())

Both examples depend on using protobuf