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Date and Time

This document discusses working with dates in Python. It explains that the datetime module must be imported to work with date objects. It provides examples of getting the current date and time using datetime.datetime.now() and the current date using datetime.date.today(). It also demonstrates how to create date objects by specifying the year, month and day, and how to extract attributes like year, month and day from date objects. Finally, it discusses using the strftime() method to format date objects into readable strings according to different directives.

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Violet Shaikh
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45 views

Date and Time

This document discusses working with dates in Python. It explains that the datetime module must be imported to work with date objects. It provides examples of getting the current date and time using datetime.datetime.now() and the current date using datetime.date.today(). It also demonstrates how to create date objects by specifying the year, month and day, and how to extract attributes like year, month and day from date objects. Finally, it discusses using the strftime() method to format date objects into readable strings according to different directives.

Uploaded by

Violet Shaikh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Python Dates

A date in Python is not a data type of its own, but we can import a module
named datetime to work with dates as date objects.

Example
Import the datetime module and display the current date:

Example 1: Get Current Date and Time


1. import datetime
2.
3. datetime_object = datetime.datetime.now()
4. print(datetime_object)

When you run the program, the output will be something like:

2018-12-19 09:26:03.478039

Here, we have imported datetime module using import datetime statement.


One of the classes defined in the datetime module is datetime class. We then
used now() method to create a datetime object containing the current local date and
time.

Example 2: Get Current Date


1.
2. import datetime
3.
4. date_object = datetime.date.today()
5. print(date_object)

When you run the program, the output will be something like:

2018-12-19

In this program, we have used today() method defined in the date class to get
a date object containing the current local date.
Creating Date Objects
To create a date, we can use the datetime() class (constructor) of
the datetime module.

The datetime() class requires three parameters to create a date: year, month,
day.

Example
Create a date object:

import datetime

x = datetime.date(2020, 5, 17)

print(x)

Print today's year, month and day


We can get year, month, day, day of the week etc. from the date object easily. Here's
how:

1.
2. from datetime import date
3.
4. # date object of today's date
5. today = date.today()
6.
7. print("Current year:", today.year)
8. print("Current month:", today.month)
9. print("Current day:", today.day)

The strftime() Method


The datetime object has a method for formatting date objects into readable
strings.
The method is called strftime(), and takes one parameter, format, to specify
the format of the returned string:

Example
Display the name of the month:

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 1)

print(x.strftime("%B"))

A reference of all the legal format codes:

Directive Description Example Try it

%a Weekday, short version Wed

%A Weekday, full version Wednesday

%w Weekday as a number 0-6, 0 is Sunday 3

%d Day of month 01-31 31

%b Month name, short version Dec

%B Month name, full version December


%m Month as a number 01-12 12

%y Year, short version, without century 18

%Y Year, full version 2018

%H Hour 00-23 17

%I Hour 00-12 05

%p AM/PM PM

%M Minute 00-59 41

%S Second 00-59 08

%f Microsecond 000000-999999 548513

%z UTC offset +0100

%Z Timezone CST
%j Day number of year 001-366 365

%U Week number of year, Sunday as the first day of week, 00-53 52

%W Week number of year, Monday as the first day of week, 00- 52


53

%c Local version of date and time Mon Dec 31 17:41:00


2018

%x Local version of date 12/31/18

%X Local version of time 17:41:00

%% A % character %

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