easytime

The simplest python time library ever written.

Why a Time Library?

Handling times in python is painful. This library makes it not painful. That is the reason.

I know there are plenty of ways to handle this sort of thing, but this is my way, and I enjoy it.

Maybe you will too.

Install

The simplest way to install easytime is via pip, the python package manager:

$ pip install easytime

If you'd like to upgrade easytime to the latest release, you can do so at any time by running:

$ pip install -U easytime

Usage

Using easytime is, well, ... easy. There are only a couple things you need to know:

1. Always use UTC when handling time in your program. The best way to do this is via the easytime.utcnow() method, for instance:

   >>> from easytime import easytime
   >>> now = easytime.utcnow()
   >>> now
   easytime(2012, 11, 18, 16, 53, 30, 316026)

2. Only use timezones to display time data to users! This means that you should keep your time in UTC always, until the very last second when you have to display time to your user. To do this, you can use the easytime.convert() method:

   >>> from easytime import easytime
   >>> now = easytime.utcnow()
   >>> now
   easytime(2012, 11, 19, 0, 56, 30, 847490)
   >>> now.convert('America/Los_Angeles')   # Convert the time to LA time.
   datetime.datetime(2012, 11, 18, 16, 56, 30, 847490, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/Los_Angeles' PST-1 day, 16:00:00 STD>)
   >>> now.convert('Europe/Berlin') # Convert the time to Berlin time.
   datetime.datetime(2012, 11, 19, 1, 56, 30, 847490, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Berlin' CET+1:00:00 STD>)

If you follow the above two rules, you will no longer hate your life each time you need to use timezones.

Details

easytime is really nothing more than a simple wrapper around python's built-in datetime.datetime type. Every easytime object is a datetime object, with two exceptions:

• You have access to a new method, convert, which allows you to specify a timezone (the full list is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones) to convert your datetime into. This is how you can display the time in different local timezones.

• You are forced to use UTC. Even if you try to generate a local time, eg: datetime.datetime.now(), you'll get back UTC, because easytime overrides it.

You can do anything with easytime that you can do with a normal datetime.datetime object, so be sure to read the official Python datetime documentation if you need to do anything more advanced.