CodexBloom - Programming Q&A Platform

Handling Timezone Offsets in Date Calculations with Python's Arrow Library

👀 Views: 199 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14
python datetime arrow flask Python

I'm not sure how to approach Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy... I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I'm working with time-sensitive data in a web application built with Flask, and I'm using the Arrow library (version 1.2.0) to manage date and time operations. The question arises when I perform date arithmetic with timezone-aware datetime objects. For instance, when attempting to calculate the difference between two timestamps, I get unexpected results due to timezone offsets. Here's a snippet of my code: ```python import arrow date1 = arrow.get('2023-10-01 12:00:00', 'US/Pacific') date2 = arrow.get('2023-10-01 15:00:00', 'US/Eastern') timedelta = date2 - date1 print(timedelta) ``` This outputs `None`, which is not what I expect. I believed that Arrow would handle the timezone conversion automatically. Instead, I'm running into issues when the two dates are in different time zones. I tried using `date1.to('UTC')` and `date2.to('UTC')` before the subtraction, but I still get a result that doesn't reflect the actual time difference correctly. The printed output is confusing, as it doesn't show the timedelta as a proper duration. How can I correctly calculate the time difference between two timestamps in different time zones using Arrow? Is there a best practice for managing this in a Flask application? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Am I missing something obvious? For context: I'm using Python on Windows. I've been using Python for about a year now. Am I missing something obvious? For reference, this is a production application. Thanks for taking the time to read this!