creating a timezone aware datetime object returns a wrong timezone

Question

when I create a timezone aware datetime object for \'US/Eastern\' and print it out, It shows as if my time zone is -4:56 instead of -4:00<

Answer 1

Have a look at dateutil - you can safely construct the tz-aware datetime object using your originally intended method:

import datetime
import dateutil

obj = datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 1, 9, 30, tzinfo=dateutil.tz.gettz('US/Eastern'))
print(obj)
# 2020-07-01 09:30:00-04:00

In Python 3.9, there will be zoneinfo as part of the standard lib for that task.

Answer 2

It is mentioned in the docs that constructing datetime objects doesn't work this way.

You are supposed to do this:

from datetime import datetime

from pytz import timezone

eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
obj = eastern.localize(datetime(2020, 7, 1, 9, 30))

>>> obj
datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 1, 9, 30, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)
>>> print(obj)
2020-07-01 09:30:00-04:00