Why does creating a datetime with a tzinfo from pytz show a weird time offset?

Question

Can someone explain me why I do not get the same result in those?

import datetime,pytz
var1 = datetime.datetime(2017,10,25,20,10,50,tzinfo=pytz.timezone("Europe/Athens")))
print(var1)

The output of this code is: 2017-10-25 20:10:50+01:35

import datetime,pytz
var1 = datetime.datetime(2017,10,25,20,10,50)
var1 = pytz.timezone("Europe/Athens").localize(var1)
print(var1)

The output of this code is: 2017-10-25 20:10:50+03:00

My question is why they have different timezones (1:35 and 3:00). I know that the second code is true because my UTC is 3:00. But can you tell me why I am getting 1:35 in the first one?

Answer 1

There is no problem, datetime just happily reports the offset of the tzinfo in whatever reference frame.

By default pytz.timezone doesn't give the UTC offset but the LMT (local mean time) offset:

>>> pytz.timezone("Europe/Athens")
<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Athens' LMT+1:35:00 STD>
#                          ^^^-------------------- local mean time

However when you localize it:

>>> var1 = datetime.datetime(2017,10,25,20,10,50)
>>> var1 = pytz.timezone("Europe/Athens").localize(var1)
>>> var1.tzinfo
<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Athens' EEST+3:00:00 DST>
#                          ^^^^-------------------- eastern european summer time

A different offset is now reported, this time based on the EEST.

Answer 2

tzinfo doesn't work well for some timezones and that could be the reason for the wrong result.
pytz doc:

Unfortunately using the tzinfo argument of the standard datetime constructors ‘’does not work’’ with pytz for many timezones.

Using localize or astimezone is a fix to this problem. Doc says that The preferred way of dealing with times is to always work in UTC, converting to localtime only when generating output to be read by humans.

import datetime, pytz
localTimezone = pytz.timezone('Europe/Athens')
var1 = datetime.datetime(2017,10,25,20,10,50,tzinfo=pytz.utc) 
loc_dt = var1.astimezone(localTimezone)
fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z'
print(loc_dt.strftime(fmt))  

This will print

2017-10-25 23:10:50 EEST+0300