In this tutorial, we will discuss how can we use the datetime module to get the current date and time. We will also convert the 3 default datetime to different formats using strftime method().
Get the current date and time
There are two methods in datetime which can print the current date and time. Whether we can use the now() method or today() method to get the current time and date.
Example:
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()
today = datetime.today()
print('Get date and time using now() method=',now)
print('Get date and time using today() method=',today)
Output:
Get date and time using now() method= 2019-08-06 20:54:01.297468 Get date and time using today() method= 2019-08-06 20:54:01.297468
Behind the code:
In the above example, we have used two methods now() and today() both worked same and give us the current date and time.
The time and date we get using the now() and today() method is very hard to read, let’s use the strftime() method to format the date and time sothe user can easily read it.
Example:
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()
date = now.strftime('%d %B, %Y')
time = now.strftime('%H:%M')
print("Today's date is=",date)
print('Time is =',time)
Output:
Today's date is= 06 August, 2019 Time is = 21:47
Behind the code:
In the above example, we used the now() method to get the current date and time, then we use the strftime() method to format the datetime object now.
The date and time variables are string by nature. We have used the format codes inside the strftime() method.
Get the current date only:
When we use the today() or now() method to print the current date and time, by default it gives the complete date and time at once, what if we only want date, not time? For this, we can do formatting using the strftime() method as we have done in the above example, but there is a problem with that, whenever we the strftime() method to separate date and time we get a string data type.
There is another approach to get the current date and the date type of the date would remain datetime, but the date we get it would be in the default format.
To get the current date only we use the date.today() method:
Example:
from datetime import date
today_date = date.today()
print("Today is: ", today_date)
print("The type of today_date is: ", type(today_date))
Output
Today is: 2019-08-06 The type of today_date is: <class 'datetime.date'>
Get the current time only:
In python, we can use the now() method to get the current time in datetime object, without using the strftime() method.
Example:
from datetime import datetime
current_time = datetime.now().time()
print("Time is : ", current_time)
print("The type of current_time is: ", type(current_time))
Output:
Time is : 21:40:13.044270 The type of current_time is: <class 'datetime.time'>
Python Tutorials
Introduction
- Getting Started
- Keywords and Identifiers
- Statements & Comments
- Python Variables
- Python Datatypes
- Python Type Conversion
- Python I/O and import
- Python Operators
- Python Namespace
Python Flow Control
Python Functions
Python Datatypes
Python Files
Python Object & Class
Python Advanced Topics
- Python Iterator
- Python Generator
- Python Closure
- Python Decorators
- Python Property
- Python RegEx
- Python Examples