Python has a module named datetime to work with dates and times.
It provides a variety of classes for representing and manipulating dates and times, as well as for formatting and parsing dates and times in a variety of formats.
Example 1: Get Current Date and Time
Output
2022-12-27 08:26:49.219717
Here, we have imported the datetime module using the import datetime statement.
One of the classes defined in the datetime module is the datetime class.
We then used the now() method to create a datetime object containing the current local date and time.
Example 2: Get Current Date
Output
2022-12-27
In the above example, we have used the today() method defined in the date class to get a date object containing the current local date.
Attributes of datetime Module
We can use the dir() function to get a list containing all attributes of a module.
Output
['MAXYEAR', 'MINYEAR', '__builtins__', '__cached__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__', '_divide_and_round', 'date', 'datetime', 'datetime_CAPI', 'time', 'timedelta', 'timezone', 'tzinfo']
Among all the attributes of datetime module, the most commonly used classes in the datetime module are:
datetime.datetime- represents a single point in time, including a date and a time.datetime.date- represents a date (year, month, and day) without a time.datetime.time- represents a time (hour, minute, second, and microsecond) without a date.datetime.timedelta- represents a duration, which can be used to perform arithmetic with datetime objects.
Python datetime.date Class
In Python, we can instantiate date objects from the date class. A date object represents a date (year, month and day).
Example 3: Date object to represent a date
Output
2022-12-25
Here, date() in the above example is a constructor of the date class. The constructor takes three arguments: year, month and day.
Import Only date Class
We can only import the date class from the datetime module. For example,
Output
2022-12-25
Here, from datetime import date only imports the date class from the datetime module.
Example 4: Get current date using today()
We can create a date object containing the current date by using the class method named today(). For example,
Output
Today's date = 2022-12-27
Example 5: Get date from a timestamp
We can also create date objects from a timestamp.
A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds between a particular date and January 1, 1970 at UTC. You can convert a timestamp to date using the fromtimestamp() method.
Output
Date = 2012-01-11
Example 6: Print today's year, month and day
We can get year, month, day, day of the week etc. from the date object easily. For example,
Output
Current year: 2022 Current month: 12 Current day: 27
Python datetime.time Class
A time object instantiated from the time class represents the local time.
Example 7: Time object to represent time
Output
a = 00:00:00 b = 11:34:56 c = 11:34:56 d = 11:34:56.234566
Example 8: Print hour, minute, second and microsecond
Once we create the time object, we can easily print its attributes such as hour, minute etc. For example,
Output
Hour = 11 Minute = 34 Second = 56 Microsecond = 0
Here, notice that we haven't passed the microsecond argument. Hence, its default value 0 is printed.
The datetime.datetime Class
The datetime module has a class named datetime that can contain information from both date and time objects.
Example 9: Python datetime object
Output
2022-12-28 00:00:00 2022-12-28 23:55:59.342380
The first three arguments year, month and day in the datetime() constructor are mandatory.
Example 10: Print year, month, hour, minute and timestamp
Output
year = 202 month = 12 day = 28 hour = 23 minute = 55 timestamp = 1511913359.34238
Python datetime.timedelta Class
A timedelta object represents the difference between two dates or times. For example,
Output
t3 = 201 days, 0:00:00 t6 = -333 days, 1:14:20 Type of t3 = <class 'datetime.timedelta'> Type of t6 = <class 'datetime.timedelta'>
Notice, both t3 and t6 are of <class 'datetime.timedelta'> type.
Example 12: Difference between two timedelta objects
Output
t3 = 14 days, 13:55:39
Here, we have created two timedelta objects t1 and t2, and their difference is printed on the screen.
Example 14: Time duration in seconds
We can get the total number of seconds in a timedelta object using the total_seconds() method.
Output
Total seconds = 435633.233423
Python format datetime
The way date and time is represented may be different in different places, organizations etc. It's more common to use mm/dd/yyyy in the US, whereas dd/mm/yyyy is more common in the UK.
Python has strftime() and strptime() methods to handle this.
Python strftime() Method
The strftime() method is defined under classes date, datetime and time. The method creates a formatted string from a given date, datetime or time object.
Let's see an example.
Output
time: 04:34:52 s1: 12/26/2018, 04:34:52 s2: 26/12/2018, 04:34:52
Here, %Y, %m, %d, %H etc. are format codes. The strftime() method takes one or more format codes and returns a formatted string based on it.
In the above example, t, s1 and s2 are strings.
%Y- year [0001,..., 2018, 2019,..., 9999]%m- month [01, 02, ..., 11, 12]%d- day [01, 02, ..., 30, 31]%H- hour [00, 01, ..., 22, 23%M- minute [00, 01, ..., 58, 59]%S- second [00, 01, ..., 58, 59]
To learn more about strftime() and format codes, visit: Python strftime().
Python strptime() Method
The strptime() method creates a datetime object from a given string (representing date and time). For example,
Output
date_string = 25 december, 2022 date_object = 2018-06-21 00:00:00
The strptime() method takes two arguments:
- a string representing date and time
- format code equivalent to the first argument
By the way, %d, %B and %Y format codes are used for day, month(full name) and year respectively.
Visit Python strptime() to learn more.
Handling timezone in Python
Suppose, we are working on a project and need to display date and time based on their timezone.
Rather than trying to handle timezone yourself, we suggest to use a third-party pytZ module.
Output
Local: 12/27/2022, 09:40:19 NY: 12/27/2022, 04:40:19 London: 12/27/2022, 09:40:19
Here, datetime_NY and datetime_London are datetime objects containing the current date and time of their respective timezone.