Google App Engine, parsedatetime and TimeZones

Posted by Ron on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ron
Published on 2011-01-06T07:07:42Z Indexed on 2011/01/13 7:53 UTC
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Hey guys,

I'm working on a Google App Engine / Django app and I encountered the following problem: In my html I have an input for time. The input is free text - the user types "in 1 hour" or "tomorrow at 11am". The text is then sent to the server in AJAX, which parses it using this python library: http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/. Once parsed, the server returns an epoch timestamp of the time. Here is the problem - Google App Engine always runs on UTC. Therefore, lets say that the local time is now 11am and the UTC time is 2am. When I send "now" to the server it will return "2am", which is good because I want the date to be received in UTC time. When I send "in 1 hour" the server will return "3am" which is good, again. However, when I send "at noon" the server will return "12pm" because it thinks that I'm talking about noon UTC - but really I need it to return 3am, which is noon for the request sender.. I can pass on the TZ of the browser that sends the request, but that wont really help me - the parsedatetime library wont take a timezone argument (correct me if I'm wrong). Is there a walk around this? Maybe setting the environments TZ somehow?

Thanks!

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