How to calculate timedelta between datetimes with different timezones in Python

Question

How do you get a valid timedelta instance when differencing datetimes with different timezones in Python? I'm finding the timedelta is always 0 if the timezones are different.

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse 
>>> dt0=parse('2017-02-06 18:14:32-05:00')
>>> dt0
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 6, 18, 14, 32, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -18000))
>>> dt1=parse('2017-02-06 23:14:32+00:00')
>>> dt1
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 6, 23, 02, 12, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> (dt1-dt0).total_seconds()
0.0

This doesn't make any sense to me. I would have thought that Python's datetime class would be smart enough to normalize both values to UTC internally, and then return a timedelta based on those values. Or throw an exception. Instead it returns 0, implying both datetimes are equal, which clearly they're not. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You are confused about what the timezone means; the two times you gave are identical, so of course their difference is zero. I can duplicate your results, except that I don't have the discrepancy between the second string and second datetime that you have:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> dt0=parse('2017-02-06 18:14:32-05:00')
>>> dt0
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 6, 18, 14, 32, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -18000))
>>> dt1=parse('2017-02-06 23:14:32+00:00')
>>> dt1
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 6, 23, 14, 32, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> (dt1-dt0).total_seconds()
0.0

But watch what happens when I convert dt0 to UTC. The time gets adjusted by the 5 hour timezone difference, and it becomes identical to the second.

>>> dt0.astimezone(dt1.tzinfo)
datetime.datetime(2017, 2, 6, 23, 14, 32, tzinfo=tzutc())