This is a similar question as How to get the common name for a pytz timezone eg. EST/EDT for America/New_York , except I want to be able to just get a timezone from \"PST\" from
I ended up just manually making a dictionary that mapped abbreviations to timezone names. For example, 'PST' : 'America/Los_Angeles'
would be an entry (as would PDT for the daylight savings abbreviation).
Have you tried using strptime with the %Z format code? I've never done it myself, but at least in theory you should be able to put in the tz code there and it should get translated into a tzinfo (embedded in the datetime/time object)