Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

1. To save a datetime, we want a function that ensures that datetime always refers to UTC before actually storing it:

import datetime

def asutc(d):
    return d.astimezone(datetime.timezone.utc)

2. The asutc function can be used with any datetime to ensure it's moved to UTC before actually storing it:

>>> now = datetime.datetime.now().replace(
...    tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(hours=1))
... )
>>> now
datetime.datetime(2018, 3, 22, 0, 49, 45, 198483, 
                  tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0, 3600)))
>>> asutc(now)
datetime.datetime(2018, 3, 21, 23, 49, 49, 742126, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)