Flask Framework Cookbook - Second Edition

Advanced date and time formatting

Date and time formatting is a painful thing to handle in web applications. Such formatting in Python, using the datetime library, often increases overhead and is pretty complex when it comes to the correct handling of time zones. We should standardize timestamps to UTC when they are stored in the database, but this means that the same needs to be processed every time it is presented to users around the world.

Instead, it is smarter to defer this processing to the client side, that is, the browser. The browser always knows the current time zone of its user and will therefore be able to manipulate the date and time information correctly. This approach also reduces any unnecessary overhead from our application ...