Python Dates

Current Date and Time with Datetime in Python

Let us see how with the help of Python datetime module and a simple line of code we can get the current date in Python.

Python Datetime Example:

#import datetime python
import datetime
a = datetime.datetime.now()
print(a)

When the above code block is executed, it will display the current date (containing year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond in the same order). In the ‘datetime.datetime’ statement, the first datetime is the module and the second one is the datetime class inside of the datetime method which contains information from both date and time objects.

We can also display just one of the attributes of date in python, such as, just the year.

Example:

import datetime
a = datetime.datetime.now()
print(a.year)

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Creating Date Objects in Python

In certain cases, we will want to create a custom date instead of just displaying the current date. In those cases, we can use the datetime() class constructor of the Python datetime module.

This Python datetime() class constructor requires three parameters to create a date, that is, year, month, and day.

Example:

import datetime
a = datetime(2050,11,11)
print(a)


Output:
2050-11-11

The Python datetime() class constructor also takes parameters for time and timezone, which are hour, minute, second, microsecond, and tzone. But these parameters are optionally and rarely used. The default value of these parameters is set to 0.

The datetime module in Python also has a method to convert the date objects into readable strings. So, we can display the month or day in a readable string format instead of numerical representation.

Example:

import datetime
a = datetime.datetime(2020,6,19)
print(a.strftime(“%d”), a.strftime(“%B”))


Output:
19, June

Now, we might be wondering, how do we specify that we want to display the month in a readable string format and what ‘%B’ and ‘%d’ are. Well, Python uses C style formatting to generate new strings. These are called format codes. There are different format codes for different attributes of the date object.
Following table contains a list of all legal format codes and their short descriptions:

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We can use any of these codes with the strf method to display their respective values. The strftime method can take one or more than one format codes as argument, as shown in our example, where we have used ‘%B’ to display the full version of the month name in a readable string format and ‘%d’ to display the day of the month in a numerical format.

With this we come to the end of this module in Python Tutorial.Here we have learnt about dealing with date and time in Python with the help of datetime module. Now, if you want to know, how python can be used for data science, you can go through this blog on python for data science.

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