Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Include UTC timezone with returned datetimes

Open
#482 1 comment 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api

Research direction

No file or test is named in the issue. Start by locating datetime deserialization in the Python SDK and inspect existing tests around returned datetime values. Done means deserialized datetimes consistently include UTC timezone information and the relevant tests verify that behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Why is this feature valuable to you? Does it solve a problem you're having?

Datetimes returned by the client library do not include a timezone. As per lost timezone, the timezone is always UTC.

However, I had to search the internet and find this bug to confirm these times were UTC. I'm also going to have to manually set the timezone to UTC to actually use these datetimes in my application - a datetime without a timezone is basically meaningless.

Describe the solution you'd like

It should be trivial to include the UTC timezone everywhere that datetimes are deserialised.

Describe alternatives you've considered

N/A, there's not really other alternatives.

Additional context

N/A

Dominant language
Python
Stars
983
Forks
331
Avg merge
3m
Merged PRs (30d)
10

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from dropbox/dropbox-sdk-python

All issues in dropbox/dropbox-sdk-python

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.