Set time zone from cookie

Question

Is the set_cookie variable the correct way to signal that the cookie should be set? It does not seems pythonic to me:

cookie = request.COOKIES.get(TIMEZONE_COOKIE_NAME)
set_cookie = False
if cookie and cookie in pytz.all_timezones_set:
    timezone.activate(pytz.timezone(cookie))
elif request.ip:
    geo = GeoIP2()
    try:
        time_zone = geo.city(request.ip).time_zone
        if time_zone:
            timezone.activate(pytz.timezone(time_zone))
            set_cookie = True
    except GeoIP2Error:
        self.logger.warning('Could not determine time zone of ip address: %s', request.ip)

response = self.get_response(request)
if set_cookie:
    response.set_cookie(TIMEZONE_COOKIE_NAME, time_zone)
return response

Answer 1

Edit: Well my previous suggestions don't work with the fact that get_response has to be called with the correct timezone active.

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• Is the time_zone attribute from GeoIP2 always compatible with pytz btw.?

Perhaps the following would work, verifying the cookie value only once and discarding it if it doesn't fit:

cookie = request.COOKIES.get(TIMEZONE_COOKIE_NAME)
if cookie not in pytz.all_timezones_set:
    cookie = None

if not cookie and request.ip:
    try:
        cookie = GeoIP2().city(request.ip).time_zone
    except GeoIP2Error:
        self.logger.warning('Could not determine time zone of ip address: %s', request.ip)

if cookie:
    timezone.activate(pytz.timezone(cookie))

response = self.get_response(request)
if cookie:
    response.set_cookie(TIMEZONE_COOKIE_NAME, cookie)
return response

So, downside is a lot of mentions of cookie, upside is that it's not more costly what you had before and the call to set the timezone is only there once.

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Last point, if anything like this happens to be needed more than once, put it into separate functions. This snippet is a bit short to make that call.