Timestamp constructor parses ISO 8601 incorrectly near DST boundaries

[ischwabacher]

Original post, edited to correct ISO 8601 formats. The originally titled bug does not exist. There is, however, some unexpected behavior:

It looks like short-form ISO 8601 parsing uses the right sign after all:

In [1]: import pandas as pd

In [2]: t = pd.Timestamp('2013-11-03 1:30:00', tz='America/Havana')

In [3]: t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z %z')
Out[3]: '2013-11-03 01:30:00 CST -0500'

In [4]: t.strftime('%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z')   # ISO 8601 short format
Out[4]: '20131103T013000-0500'

In [5]: pd.Timestamp(t.strftime('%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z'))
Out[5]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='tzoffset(None, -18000)')

In [6]: t == _
Out[6]: True   # Not a bug after all!

In [7]: t.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z')   # ISO 8601 long format
Out[7]: '2013-11-03T01:30:00-0500'

In [8]: pd.Timestamp(t.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z'))
Out[8]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='pytz.FixedOffset(-300)')   # why pytz?

In [9]: t == _
Out[9]: True

In [10]: t.strftime('%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ%z')   # Not a real ISO 8601 format (note the 'Z')
Out[10]: '20131103T013000Z-0500'

In [11]: pd.Timestamp(t.strftime('%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ%z'))
Out[11]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00+0500', tz='tzoffset(None, 18000)')
# This is the behavior that inspired the bug report.  I don't know if this is a valid parse
# or not, but it sure is unexpected.

It would be awfully embarrassing if I filed a bug report because I couldn't read ISO 8601...

However, in the process of investigating this issue, I encountered the following, which is definitely a bug:

In [12]: ts = ['2013-11-%s3 %s1:30:00' % (x, y) for x in ['', '0'] for y in ['', '0']]

In [13]: ts
Out[13]: 
['2013-11-3 1:30:00',
 '2013-11-3 01:30:00',
 '2013-11-03 1:30:00',
 '2013-11-03 01:30:00']   # only this one is ISO 8601

In [14]: tzs = ['America/%s' % s for s in ['Chicago', 'New_York', 'Havana']]

In [15]: [[pd.Timestamp(t, tz=tz) for t in ts] for tz in tzs]
Out[15]: 
[[Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Chicago')],   # DST
 [Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0400', tz='America/New_York')],   # DST
 [Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 00:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')]]   # Just plain wrong

I'm not sure what's going on here.

[jreback]

cc @sinhrks

cc @rockg

[ischwabacher]

Looking at this more closely, something is very wrong:

In [1]: import pandas as pd

In [2]: pd.Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00', tz='America/Havana')
Out[2]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 00:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')  # BAD!

In [3]: pd.Timestamp('2013-11-03 1:30:00', tz='America/Havana')
Out[3]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')

[rockg]

I can't reproduce this. I'm not on the bleeding edge, but not too many commits far behind.

Timestamp('2013-11-03 1:30:00', tz='America/Havana')
Out[1]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')
Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00', tz='America/Havana')
Out[1]: Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')

Also, I think the string format up top is wrong. If you add spaces and a missing % you get it back correctly.

>>> pd.Timestamp(t.strftime('%Y%m%d %H%M%S %Z %z'))
Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500')

[rockg]

I see now that the issue is the short format even after adding the %. Let me take a look.

[rockg]

So this works without the Z. Aren't Z and %z contradictory in that %z implies an offset but Z doesn't imply one?

>>> pd.Timestamp(t.strftime('%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z'))
Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500')

[ischwabacher]

You're right about the string format; I misread ISO 8601.

The second issue persists for me, and I think it has to do with tzlocal; am I correct in assuming that you are not in the US/Central time zone? Pick a DST boundary in your local time zone and try the equivalent test there.

(EDIT: America/Havana uses "C[DS]T" for its abbreviations. So if your system time zone is US/Central, it's a good canary for telling when the machine is trying to parse the time zone abbreviation. Which it should never do, for exactly this reason.)

[rockg]

US/Eastern is my tz and that works fine as well and the same with tzlocal (I assume you were taking this from dateutil).

[ischwabacher]

Huh. I'm observing this issue on a build from source fetched about 36 hours ago.

I edited the OP. If you try the test in the second box, what do you observe?

[rockg]

Well this is fun. My versions are a few weeks old. I can check later tonight whether the behavior persists when I update.

[[Timestamp(t, tz=tz) for t in ts] for tz in tzs]
Out[18]: 
[[Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago')],
 [Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York')],
 [Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'),
  Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')]]

Further, I agree that an error should be thrown when you pass in a non-ISO8601 format. Clearly it thought it could parse it when in fact it shouldn't be able to.

[rockg]

Okay, I can reproduce when I update my code. So something was introduced between 14.1 and the latest commit to cause a different behavior. What is the right behavior here? I agree that it should be consistent but I'm not sure what the right behavior is. I suppose a consistent offset across the cases would be the right thing here as there is nothing to differentiate those times.

[Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0600', tz='America/Chicago'), 
Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Chicago')]
[Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/New_York'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0400', tz='America/New_York')]
[Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 01:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana'), 
 Timestamp('2013-11-03 00:30:00-0500', tz='America/Havana')]

[ischwabacher]

I would support an ambiguous kwarg to the Timestamp constructor, à la #7963, with the same default. I think the docs should gently encourage the format of Timestamp.__repr__ as a best practice, though.