[Info-vax] EU will abandon daylight savings time in 2021)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-03 18:59:53 +0000, Jan-Erik Sderholm said:

> It is transmitted as "Unix epoch" format, no problem with that.
> We can easily subtract 3600 or 7200 from the epoch-number of seconds.

Unix epoch will work for recent values and for apps with minimal 
requirements, but it's not the base that I'd choose to use with a new 
app.  I'd usually pass around the ISO 8601 text in UTC, given the 
choice.  Yeah, there can be parsing-numerics versus parsing-dates 
parsing discussions and there can be discussions of relative 
performance here.  Maybe those discussions can be later, if the 
performance becomes an issue.  OpenVMS can deal with the conversions 
directly to the specified timezone, and without knowing nor hard-coding 
the timezone offsets.  So too can Python.

Start here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/28147286/94997

Related:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79797/how-to-convert-local-time-string-to-utc 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2150739/iso-time-iso-8601-in-python

Also date.isoformat(), date.isoformat(), UTC-related calls, etc.
https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html

Another approach:
https://pythonhosted.org/pytz/




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