How to find next day's Unix timestamp for same hour, including DST, in Python?

Question 1

Without using a new package:

def add_day(x):
    d = x.date()+DT.timedelta(1)
    return mtl.localize(x.replace(year=d.year, month=d.month, day=d.day, tzinfo=None))

Full script:

import datetime as DT
import pytz
import calendar
mtl = pytz.timezone('America/Montreal')
naive_time3 = DT.datetime.strptime('2013/11/03', '%Y/%m/%d')
print repr(naive_time3)
#datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 3, 0, 0)
localized_time3 = mtl.localize(naive_time3)
print repr(localized_time3)
#datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 3, 0, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/Montreal' EDT-1 day, 20:00:00 DST>)
print calendar.timegm(localized_time3.utctimetuple())
#1383451200.0
def add_day(x):
    d = x.date()+DT.timedelta(1)
    return mtl.localize(x.replace(year=d.year, month=d.month, day=d.day, tzinfo=None))
print repr(add_day(localized_time3))
#datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 4, 0, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'America/Montreal' EST-1 day, 19:00:00 STD>)

(calendar is for Python2.)

Question 2

I gradually provide several solutions with the most robust solution at the very end of this answer that tries to handle the following issues:

utc offset due to DST
past dates when the local timezone might have had different utc offset due to reason unrelated to DST. dateutil and stdlib solutions fail here on some systems, notably Windows
ambiguous times during DST (don't know whether Arrow provides interface to handle it)
non-existent times during DST (the same)

To find POSIX timestamp for tomorrow's midnight (or other fixed hour) in a given timezone, you could use code from How do I get the UTC time of “midnight” for a given timezone?:

from datetime import datetime, time, timedelta
import pytz

DAY = timedelta(1)
tz = pytz.timezone('America/Montreal')

tomorrow = datetime(2013, 11, 3).date() + DAY

midnight = tz.localize(datetime.combine(tomorrow, time(0, 0)), is_dst=None)
timestamp = (midnight - datetime(1970, 1, 1, tzinfo=pytz.utc)).total_seconds()

dt.date() method returns the same naive date for both naive and timezone-aware dt objects.

The explicit formula for timestamp is used to support Python version before Python 3.3. Otherwise .timestamp() method could be used in Python 3.3+.

To avoid ambiguity in parsing input dates during DST transitions that are unavoidable for .localize() method unless you know is_dst parameter, you could use Unix timestamps stored with the dates:

from datetime import datetime, time, timedelta
import pytz

DAY = timedelta(1)
tz = pytz.timezone('America/Montreal')

local_dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp_from_the_log, tz)
tomorrow = local_dt.date() + DAY

midnight = tz.localize(datetime.combine(tomorrow, time(0, 0)), is_dst=None)
timestamp = (midnight - datetime(1970, 1, 1, tzinfo=pytz.utc)).total_seconds()

To support other fixed hours (not only midnight):

tomorrow = local_dt.replace(tzinfo=None) + DAY # tomorrow, same time
dt_plus_day = tz.localize(tomorrow, is_dst=None)
timestamp = dt_plus_day.timestamp() # use the explicit formula before Python 3.3

is_dst=None raises an exception if the result date is ambiguous or non-existent. To avoid exception, you could choose the time that is closest to the previous date from yesterday (same DST state i.e., is_dst=local_dt.dst()):

from datetime import datetime, time, timedelta
import pytz

DAY = timedelta(1)
tz = pytz.timezone('America/Montreal')

local_dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp_from_the_log, tz)
tomorrow = local_dt.replace(tzinfo=None) + DAY

dt_plus_day = tz.localize(tomorrow, is_dst=local_dt.dst())
dt_plus_day = tz.normalize(dt_plus_day) # to detect non-existent times                                            
timestamp = (dt_plus_day - datetime(1970, 1, 1, tzinfo=pytz.utc)).total_seconds()

.localize() respects given time even if it is non-existent, therefore .normalize() is required to fix the time. You could raise an exception here if normalize() method changes its input (non-existent time detected in this case) for consistency with other code examples.

Question 3

(Thanks to @rdodev for pointing me to Arrow).

Using Arrow, this operation becomes easy:

>>> import arrow
>>> import datetime as DT
>>> lt3 = arrow.get(DT.datetime(2013, 11, 3), 'America/Montreal')
>>> lt3
<Arrow [2013-11-03T00:00:00-04:00]>
>>> lt4 = arrow.get(DT.datetime(2013, 11, 4), 'America/Montreal')
>>> lt4
<Arrow [2013-11-04T00:00:00-05:00]>
>>> lt4.timestamp - (lt3.replace(days=1).timestamp)
0
>>> (lt3.replace(days=1).timestamp - lt3.timestamp) / 3600
25.0

Using Arrow's replace method, singular unit names replace that property while plural adds to it. So lt3.replace(days=1) is November 4th, 2013 while lt3.replace(day=1) is November 1st, 2013.

Question 4

Here an alternative based on dateutil:

>>> # In Spain we changed DST 10/26/2013
>>> import datetime
>>> import dateutil.tz
>>> # tzlocal gets the timezone of the computer
>>> dt1 = datetime.datetime(2013, 10, 26, 14, 00).replace(tzinfo=dateutil.tz.tzlocal())
>>> print dt1
2013-10-26 14:00:00+02:00
>>> dt2 = dt1 + datetime.timedelta(1)
>>> print dt2
2013-10-27 14:00:00+01:00
# see if we hace 25 hours of difference
>>> import time
>>> (time.mktime(dt2.timetuple()) - time.mktime(dt1.timetuple())) / 3600.0
25.0
>>> (float(dt2.strftime('%s')) - float(dt1.strftime('%s'))) / 3600   # the same
25.0