Datetime library in python

Skill - datetime module in Python

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Skills Required

• Setup python development environment
• Basic Printing in Python
• Commenting in Python
• Managing Variables in python
• strings in python

Please make sure to have all the skills mentioned above to understand and execute the code mentioned below. Go through the above skills if necessary for reference or revision

datetime is an in-built module in python and is very useful for manipulating date-times.

Create a datetime

import datetime as dt

# get current time
curTime = dt.datetime.now()
print(curTime)

# create a datetime from a specific date time, say 10th May 2020 15 Hrs, 22 mins, 40 secs
t1 = dt.datetime(2020, 5, 10, 15, 22, 40)
print(t1)

# create a datetime from a specific date only, say 10th May 2020
t2 = dt.datetime(2020, 5, 10)
print(t2)

# create datetime from UNIX timestamp
# UNIX timestamp = number seconds from 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC (also called UNIX epoch)
t3 = dt.datetime.fromtimestamp(1589068800)
print(t3)

# get timestamp from datetime
print(dt.datetime.timestamp(t3))

As shown above it is really easy to create datetime objects

get datetime from string using ‘strptime’

By using appropriate format string, we can convert string to datetime objects using strptime function

import datetime as dt

dtStr1 = '2020-05-10'
# create datetime object from string using strptime
dt1 = dt.datetime.strptime(dtStr1, '%Y-%m-%d')
print(dt1)

dtStr2 = '2020-05-10 15:21:32'
dt2 = dt.datetime.strptime(dtStr2, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
print(dt2)

dtStr3 = '05 May 2020 16:58:14'
dt3 = dt.datetime.strptime(dtStr3, '%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')
print(dt3)

Format codes for string conversion can be seen below

Format datetime as string using ‘strftime’ function

import datetime as dt

dt1 = dt.datetime.now()
# convert datetime object to string using strftime
dtStr = dt.datetime.strftime(dt1, '%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')
print(dtStr)

access datetime components

t1 = dt.datetime.now()

print('original object = {0}'.format(t1))
print('day = {0}'.format(t1.day))
print('month = {0}'.format(t1.month))
print('year = {0}'.format(t1.year))
print('hours = {0}'.format(t1.hour))
print('minutes = {0}'.format(t1.minute))
print('seconds = {0}'.format(t1.second))
print('microseconds = {0}'.format(t1.microsecond))

Video

Video for this post can be found here

Online Interpreter

You can run these codes online at https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/online-compiler/

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References

• Detailed examples - https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/datetime
• Official documentation - https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html

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