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Using Python datetime to Work With Dates and Times

Table of Contents

How Computers Count Time

How standard dates can be reported, how time should be stored in your program, creating python datetime instances, using strings to create python datetime instances, starting your pycon countdown, using dateutil to add time zones to python datetime, comparing naive and aware python datetime instances, improving your pycon countdown, doing arithmetic with python datetime, using relativedelta in your pycon countdown, showing the pycon date in your pycon countdown, finalizing your pycon countdown, alternatives to python datetime and dateutil, further reading.

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Using Python's datetime Module

Working with dates and times is one of the biggest challenges in programming. Between dealing with time zones, daylight saving time, and different written date formats, it can be tough to keep track of which days and times you’re referencing. Fortunately, the built-in Python datetime module can help you manage the complex nature of dates and times.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• Why programming with dates and times is such a challenge
• Which functions are available in the Python datetime module
• How to print or read a date and time in a specific format
• How to do arithmetic with dates and times

Plus, you’re going to develop a neat application to count down the time remaining until the next PyCon US!

Free Bonus: Click here to get our free Python Cheat Sheet that shows you the basics of Python 3, like working with data types, dictionaries, lists, and Python functions.

Let’s get started!

Programming With Dates and Times

If you’ve ever worked on software that needed to keep track of times across several geographic areas, then you probably have a sense of why programming with time can be such a pain. The fundamental disconnect is that computer programs prefer events that are perfectly ordered and regular, but the way in which most humans use and refer to time is highly irregular.

Note: If you want to learn more about why time can be so complicated to deal with, then there are many great resources available on the web. Here are a few good places to start:

• Computerphile: The Problem With Time & Timezones
• Working With Time Zones: Everything You Wish You Didn’t Need to Know
• The Complexity of Time Data Programming

One great example of this irregularity is daylight saving time . In the United States and Canada, clocks are set forward by one hour on the second Sunday in March and set back by one hour on the first Sunday in November. However, this has only been the case since 2007 . Prior to 2007, clocks were set forward on the first Sunday in April and set back on the last Sunday in October.

Things get even more complicated when you consider time zones . Ideally, time zone boundaries would follow lines of longitude exactly. However, for historical and political reasons, time zone lines are rarely straight. Often, areas that are separated by large distances find themselves in the same time zone, and adjacent areas are in different time zones. There are some time zones out there with pretty funky shapes .

Nearly all computers count time from an instant called the Unix epoch . This occurred on January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC. UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time and refers to the time at a longitude of 0°. UTC is often also called Greenwich Mean Time , or GMT. UTC is not adjusted for daylight saving time, so it consistently keeps twenty-four hours in every day.

By definition, Unix time elapses at the same rate as UTC, so a one-second step in UTC corresponds to a one-second step in Unix time. You can usually figure out the date and time in UTC of any given instant since January 1, 1970, by counting the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, with the exception of leap seconds . Leap seconds are occasionally added to UTC to account for the slowing of the Earth’s rotation but are not added to Unix time.

Note: There’s an interesting bug associated with Unix time. Since many older operating systems are 32-bit, they store the Unix time in a 32-bit signed integer.

This means that at 03:14:07 on January 19, 2038, the integer will overflow, resulting in what’s known as the Year 2038 problem , or Y2038. Similar to the Y2K problem , Y2038 will need to be corrected to avoid catastrophic consequences for critical systems.

Nearly all programming languages, including Python , incorporate the concept of Unix time. Python’s standard library includes a module called time that can print the number of seconds since the Unix epoch:

In this example, you import the time module and execute time() to print the Unix time, or number of seconds (excluding leap seconds) since the epoch.

In addition to Unix time, computers need a way to convey time information to users. As you saw in the last example, Unix time is nearly impossible for a human to parse. Instead, Unix time is typically converted to UTC, which can then be converted into a local time using time zone offsets .

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains a database of all of the values of time zone offsets. IANA also releases regular updates that include any changes in time zone offsets. This database is often included with your operating system, although certain applications may include an updated copy.

The database contains a copy of all the designated time zones and how many hours and minutes they’re offset from UTC. So, during the winter, when daylight saving time is not in effect, the US Eastern time zone has an offset of -05:00, or negative five hours from UTC. Other regions have different offsets, which may not be integer hours. The UTC offset for Nepal, for example, is +05:45, or positive five hours and forty-five minutes from UTC.

Unix time is how computers count time, but it would be incredibly inefficient for humans to determine the time by calculating the number of seconds from an arbitrary date. Instead, we work in terms of years, months, days, and so forth. But even with these conventions in place, another layer of complexity stems from the fact that different languages and cultures have different ways of writing the date.

For instance, in the United States, dates are usually written starting with the month, then the day, then the year. This means that January 31, 2020, is written as 01-31-2020 . This closely matches the long-form written version of the date.

However, most of Europe and many other areas write the date starting with the day, then the month, then the year. This means that January 31, 2020, is written as 31-01-2020 . These differences can cause all sorts of confusion when communicating across cultures.

To help avoid communication mistakes, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed ISO 8601 . This standard specifies that all dates should be written in order of most-to-least-significant data. This means the format is year, month, day, hour, minute, and second:

In this example, YYYY represents a four-digit year, and MM and DD are the two-digit month and day, starting with a zero if necessary. After that, HH , MM , and SS represent the two-digit hours, minutes, and seconds, starting with a zero if necessary.

The advantage of this format is that the date can be represented with no ambiguity. Dates written as DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY can be misinterpreted if the day is a valid month number. You’ll see a little later on how you can use the ISO 8601 format with Python datetime .

Most developers who have worked with time have heard the advice to convert local time to UTC and store that value for later reference. In many cases, especially when you’re storing dates from the past, this is enough information to do any necessary arithmetic.

However, a problem can happen if a user of your program inputs a future date in their local time. Time zone and daylight saving time rules change fairly frequently, as you saw earlier with the 2007 change in daylight saving time for the United States and Canada. If the time zone rules for your user’s location change before the future date that they inputted, then UTC won’t provide enough information to convert back to the correct local time.

Note: There are a number of excellent resources available to help you determine the appropriate way to store time data in your application. Here are a few places to start:

• Daylight saving time and time zone best practices
• Storing UTC is not a Silver Bullet
• How to save datetimes for future events
• Coding Best Practices Using DateTime in the .NET Framework

In this case, you need to store the local time, including the time zone, that the user inputted as well as the version of the IANA time zone database that was in effect when the user saved the time. This way, you’ll always be able to convert the local time to UTC. However, this approach won’t always allow you to convert UTC to the correct local time.

Using the Python datetime Module

As you can see, working with dates and times in programming can be complicated. Fortunately, you rarely need to implement complicated features from scratch these days since many open-source libraries are available to help out. This is definitely the case in Python, which includes three separate modules in the standard library to work with dates and times:

• calendar outputs calendars and provides functions using an idealized Gregorian calendar .
• datetime supplies classes for manipulating dates and times.
• time provides time-related functions where dates are not needed.

In this tutorial, you’ll focus on using the Python datetime module. The main focus of datetime is to make it less complicated to access attributes of the object related to dates, times, and time zones. Since these objects are so useful, calendar also returns instances of classes from datetime .

time is less powerful and more complicated to use than datetime . Many functions in time return a special struct_time instance. This object has a named tuple interface for accessing stored data, making it similar to an instance of datetime . However, it doesn’t support all of the features of datetime , especially the ability to perform arithmetic with time values.

datetime provides three classes that make up the high-level interface that most people will use:

• datetime.date is an idealized date that assumes the Gregorian calendar extends infinitely into the future and past. This object stores the year , month , and day as attributes.
• datetime.time is an idealized time that assumes there are 86,400 seconds per day with no leap seconds. This object stores the hour , minute , second , microsecond , and tzinfo (time zone information).
• datetime.datetime is a combination of a date and a time . It has all the attributes of both classes.

The three classes that represent dates and times in datetime have similar initializers . They can be instantiated by passing keyword arguments for each of the attributes, such as year , date , or hour . You can try the code below to get a sense of how each object is created:

In this code, you import the three main classes from datetime and instantiate each of them by passing arguments to the constructor. You can see that this code is somewhat verbose, and if you don’t have the information you need as integers , these techniques can’t be used to create datetime instances.

Fortunately, datetime provides several other convenient ways to create datetime instances. These methods don’t require you to use integers to specify each attribute, but instead allow you to use some other information:

• date.today() creates a datetime.date instance with the current local date.
• datetime.now() creates a datetime.datetime instance with the current local date and time.
• datetime.combine() combines instances of datetime.date and datetime.time into a single datetime.datetime instance.

These three ways of creating datetime instances are helpful when you don’t know in advance what information you need to pass into the basic initializers. You can try out this code to see how the alternate initializers work:

In this code, you use date.today() , datetime.now() , and datetime.combine() to create instances of date , datetime , and time objects. Each instance is stored in a different variable :

• today is a date instance that has only the year, month, and day.
• now is a datetime instance that has the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microseconds.
• current_time is a time instance that has the hour, minute, and second set to the same values as now .

On the last line, you combine the date information in today with the time information in current_time to produce a new datetime instance.

Warning: datetime also provides datetime.utcnow() , which returns an instance of datetime at the current UTC. However, the Python documentation recommends against using this method because it doesn’t include any time zone information in the resulting instance.

Using datetime.utcnow() may produce some surprising results when doing arithmetic or comparisons between datetime instances. In a later section , you’ll see how to assign time zone information to datetime instances.

Another way to create date instances is to use .fromisoformat() . To use this method, you provide a string with the date in the ISO 8601 format that you learned about earlier . For instance, you might provide a string with the year, month, and date specified:

This string represents the date January 31, 2020, according to the ISO 8601 format. You can create a date instance with the following example:

In this code, you use date.fromisoformat() to create a date instance for January 31, 2020. This method is very useful because it’s based on the ISO 8601 standard. But what if you have a string that represents a date and time but isn’t in the ISO 8601 format?

Fortunately, Python datetime provides a method called .strptime() to handle this situation. This method uses a special mini-language to tell Python which parts of the string are associated with the datetime attributes.

To construct a datetime from a string using .strptime() , you have to tell Python what each of the parts of the string represents using formatting codes from the mini-language. You can try this example to see how .strptime() works:

On line 1 , you create date_string , which represents the date and time January 31, 2020, at 2:45:37 PM. On line 2 , you create format_string , which uses the mini-language to specify how the parts of date_string will be turned into datetime attributes.

In format_string , you include several formatting codes and all of the dashes ( - ), colons ( : ), and spaces exactly as they appear in date_string . To process the date and time in date_string , you include the following formatting codes:

A complete listing of all of the options in the mini-language is outside the scope of this tutorial, but you can find several good references on the web, including in Python’s documentation and on a website called strftime.org .

Now that date_string and format_string are defined, you can use them to create a datetime instance. Here’s an example of how .strptime() works:

In this code, you import datetime on line 3 and use datetime.strptime() with date_string and format_string on line 4 . Finally, line 5 shows the values of the attributes in the datetime instance created by .strptime() . You can see that they match the values shown in the table above.

Note: There are more advanced ways to create datetime instances, but they involve using third-party libraries that must be installed. One particularly neat library is called dateparser , which allows you to provide natural language string inputs. The input is even supported in a number of languages:

In this code, you use dateparser to create two datetime instances by passing two different string representations of time. On line 1 , you import dateparser . Then, on line 2 , you use .parse() with the argument "yesterday" to create a datetime instance twenty-four hours in the past. At the time of writing, this was March 13, 2020, at 2:39 PM.

On line 3 , you use .parse() with the argument "morgen" . Morgen is the German word for tomorrow, so dateparser creates a datetime instance twenty-four hours in the future. At the time of writing, this was March 15 at 2:39 PM.

Now you have enough information to start working on a countdown clock for next year’s PyCon US ! PyCon US 2021 will start on May 12, 2021 in Pittsburgh, PA. With the 2020 event having been canceled , many Pythonistas are extra excited for next year’s gathering. This is a great way to keep track of how long you’ll need to wait and boost your datetime skills at the same time!

To get started, create a file called pyconcd.py and add this code:

In this code, you import datetime from datetime and define a constant, PYCON_DATE , that stores the date of the next PyCon US. You don’t expect the date of PyCon to change, so you name the variable in all caps to indicate that it’s a constant.

Next, you compute the difference between datetime.now() , which is the current time , and PYCON_DATE . Taking the difference between two datetime instances returns a datetime.timedelta instance.

timedelta instances represent the change in time between two datetime instances. The delta in the name is a reference to the Greek letter delta, which is used in science and engineering to mean a change. You’ll learn more later about how to use timedelta for more general arithmetic operations.

Finally the printed output, as of April 9, 2020 at a little before 9:30 PM is:

Only 397 days until PyCon US 2021! This output is a little clunky, so later on you’ll see how you can improve the formatting. If you run this script on a different day, you’ll get a different output. If you run the script after May 12, 2021 at 8:00 AM, you’ll get a negative amount of time remaining!

Working With Time Zones

As you saw earlier, storing the time zone in which a date occurs is an important aspect of ensuring your code is correct. Python datetime provides tzinfo , which is an abstract base class that allows datetime.datetime and datetime.time to include time zone information, including an idea of daylight saving time.

However, datetime does not provide a direct way to interact with the IANA time zone database. The Python datetime.tzinfo documentation recommends using a third-party package called dateutil . You can install dateutil with pip :

Note that the name of the package that you install from PyPI, python-dateutil , is different from the name that you use to import the package, which is just dateutil .

One reason that dateutil is so useful is that it includes an interface to the IANA time zone database. This takes the hassle out of assigning time zones to your datetime instances. Try out this example to see how to set a datetime instance to have your local time zone:

In this example, you import tz from dateutil and datetime from datetime . You then create a datetime instance set to the current time using .now() .

You also pass the tz keyword to .now() and set tz equal to tz.tzlocal() . In dateutil , tz.tzlocal() returns a concrete instance of datetime.tzinfo . This means that it can represent all the necessary time zone offset and daylight saving time information that datetime needs.

You also print the name of the time zone using .tzname() , which prints 'Eastern Standard Time' . This is the output for Windows, but on macOS or Linux, your output might read 'EST' if you’re in the US Eastern time zone during the winter.

You can also create time zones that are not the same as the time zone reported by your computer. To do this, you’ll use tz.gettz() and pass the official IANA name for the time zone you’re interested in. Here’s an example of how to use tz.gettz() :

In this example, you use tz.gettz() to retrieve the time zone information for London, United Kingdom and store it in London_tz . You then retrieve the current time, setting the time zone to London_tz .

On Windows, this gives the tzinfo attribute the value tzfile('GB-Eire') . On macOS or Linux, the tzinfo attribute will look something like tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London) , but it might be slightly different depending on where dateutil pulls the time zone data from.

You also use tzname() to print the name of the time zone, which is now 'GMT' , meaning Greenwich Mean Time. This output is the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

In an earlier section , you learned that you shouldn’t use .utcnow() to create a datetime instance at the current UTC. Now you know how to use dateutil.tz to supply a time zone to the datetime instance. Here’s an example modified from the recommendation in the Python documentation:

In this code, you use tz.UTC to set the time zone of datetime.now() to the UTC time zone. This method is recommended over using utcnow() because utcnow() returns a naive datetime instance, whereas the method demonstrated here returns an aware datetime instance.

Next, you’ll take a small detour to learn about naive vs aware datetime instances. If you already know all about this, then you can skip ahead to improve your PyCon countdown with time zone information.

Python datetime instances support two types of operation, naive and aware. The basic difference between them is that naive instances don’t contain time zone information, whereas aware instances do. More formally, to quote the Python documentation:

An aware object represents a specific moment in time that is not open to interpretation. A naive object does not contain enough information to unambiguously locate itself relative to other date/time objects. ( Source )

This is an important distinction for working with Python datetime . An aware datetime instance can compare itself unambiguously to other aware datetime instances and will always return the correct time interval when used in arithmetic operations.

Naive datetime instances, on the other hand, may be ambiguous. One example of this ambiguity relates to daylight saving time. Areas that practice daylight saving time turn the clocks forward one hour in the spring and backward one hour in the fall. This typically happens at 2:00 AM local time. In the spring, the hour from 2:00 AM to 2:59 AM never happens , and in the fall, the hour from 1:00 AM to 1:59 AM happens twice !

Practically, what happens is that the offset from UTC in these time zones changes throughout the year. IANA tracks these changes and catalogs them in the different database files that your computer has installed. Using a library like dateutil , which uses the IANA database under the hood, is a great way to make sure that your code properly handles arithmetic with time.

Note: In Python, the difference between naive and aware datetime instances is determined by the tzinfo attribute. An aware datetime instance has the tzinfo attribute equal to a subclass of the datetime.tzinfo abstract base class.

Python 3.8 and below provide one concrete implementation of tzinfo called timezone . However, timezone is limited to expressing fixed offsets from UTC that cannot change throughout the year, so it isn’t that useful when you need to account for changes such as daylight saving time.

Python 3.9 includes a new module called zoneinfo that provides a concrete implementation of tzinfo that tracks the IANA database, so it includes changes like daylight saving time. However, until Python 3.9 becomes widely used, it probably makes sense to rely on dateutil if you need to support multiple Python versions.

dateutil also provides several concrete implementations of tzinfo in the tz module that you used earlier. You can check out the dateutil.tz documentation for more information.

This doesn’t mean that you always need to use aware datetime instances. But aware instances are crucial if you’re comparing times with each other, especially if you’re comparing times in different parts of the world.

Now that you know how to add time zone information to a Python datetime instance, you can improve your PyCon countdown code. Earlier, you used the standard datetime constructor to pass the year, month, day, and hour that PyCon will start. You can update your code to use the dateutil.parser module, which provides a more natural interface for creating datetime instances:

In this code, you import parser and tz from dateutil and datetime from datetime . Next, you use parser.parse() to read the date of the next PyCon US from a string. This is much more readable than the plain datetime constructor.

parser.parse() returns a naive datetime instance, so you use .replace() to change the tzinfo to the America/New_York time zone. PyCon US 2021 will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is in the US Eastern time zone. The canonical name for that time zone is America/New_York since New York City is the largest city in the time zone.

PYCON_DATE is an aware datetime instance with the time zone set to US Eastern time. Since May 12 is after daylight saving time takes effect, the time zone name is 'EDT' , or 'Eastern Daylight Time' .

Next, you create now to represent the current instant of time and give it your local time zone. Last, you find the timedelta between PYCON_DATE and now and print the result. If you’re in a locale that does not adjust the clocks for daylight saving time, then you may see the number of hours remaining until PyCon change by an hour.

Python datetime instances support several types of arithmetic. As you saw earlier, this relies on using timedelta instances to represent time intervals. timedelta is very useful because it’s built into the Python standard library. Here’s an example of how to work with timedelta :

In this code, you create now , which stores the current time, and tomorrow , which is a timedelta of +1 days. Next, you add now and tomorrow to produce a datetime instance one day in the future. Note that working with naive datetime instances, as you are here, means that the day attribute of the datetime increments by one and does not account for any repeated or skipped time intervals.

timedelta instances also support negative values as the input to the arguments:

In this example, you provide -1 as the input to timedelta , so when you add now and yesterday , the result is a decrease by one in the days attribute.

timedelta instances support addition and subtraction as well as positive and negative integers for all arguments. You can even provide a mix of positive and negative arguments. For instance, you might want to add three days and subtract four hours:

In this example, you add three days and subtract four hours, so the new datetime is at January 29 at 5:37 AM. timedelta is very useful in this way, but it’s somewhat limited because it cannot add or subtract intervals larger than a day, such as a month or a year. Fortunately, dateutil provides a more powerful replacement called relativedelta .

The basic syntax of relativedelta is very similar to timedelta . You can provide keyword arguments that produce changes of any number of years, months, days, hours, seconds, or microseconds. You can reproduce the first timedelta example with this code:

In this example, you use relativedelta instead of timedelta to find the datetime corresponding to tomorrow. Now you can try adding five years, one month, and three days to now while subtracting four hours and thirty minutes:

Notice in this example that the date ends up as March 1, 2025. This is because adding three days to now would be January 29, and adding one month to that would be February 29, which only exists in a leap year. Since 2025 is not a leap year, the date rolls over to the next month.

You can also use relativedelta to calculate the difference between two datetime instances. Earlier, you used the subtraction operator to find the difference between two Python datetime instances, PYCON_DATE and now . With relativedelta , instead of using the subtraction operator, you need to pass the two datetime instances as arguments :

In this example, you create a new datetime instance for tomorrow by incrementing the days field by one. Then, you use relativedelta and pass now and tomorrow as the two arguments. dateutil then takes the difference between these two datetime instances and returns the result as a relativedelta instance. In this case, the difference is -1 days, since now happens before tomorrow .

dateutil.relativedelta objects have countless other uses. You can use them to find complex calendar information, such as the next year in which October the 13th falls on a Friday or what the date will be on the last Friday of the current month. You can even use them to replace attributes of a datetime instance and create, for example, a datetime one week in the future at 10:00 AM. You can read all about these other uses in the dateutil documentation .

Finishing Your PyCon Countdown

You now have enough tools in your belt to finish your PyCon 2021 countdown clock and provide a nice interface to use as well. In this section, you’ll use relativedelta to calculate the time remaining until PyCon, develop a function to print the time remaining in a nice format, and show the date of PyCon to the user.

First, replace the plain subtraction operator with relativedelta . With the subtraction operator, your timedelta object couldn’t count intervals of time larger than a day. However, relativedelta allows you to show the years, months, and days remaining:

The only change that you made in this code was to replace line 11 with countdown = relativedelta(PYCON_DATE, now) . The output from this script should tell you that PyCon US 2021 will happen in about one year and one month, depending on when you run the script.

However, that output isn’t very pretty since it looks like the signature of relativedelta() . You can build up some prettier output by replacing line 11 in the previous code with the code below:

This code requires Python 3.8 because it uses the new walrus operator . You can make this script work on older versions of Python by using a traditional for loop in place of line 17 .

In this code, you define time_amount() , which takes two arguments, the unit of time and the relativedelta instance from which the time units should be retrieved. If the amount of time is not equal to zero, then time_amount() returns a string with the amount of time and the time unit. Otherwise, it returns an empty string.

You use time_amount() in the comprehension on line 17 . That line creates a generator storing the non-empty strings returned from time_amount() . It uses the walrus operator to assign the return value of time_amount() to t and includes t only if it is True .

Finally, line 18 prints the final output using .join() on the generator . Next, you’ll take a look at including the PyCon date in the output from your script.

Earlier , you learned about creating datetime instances using .strptime() . This method uses a special mini-language within Python to specify how the date string is formatted.

Python datetime has an additional method called .strftime() that allows you to format a datetime instance to a string. In a sense, it’s the reverse operation of parsing using .strptime() . You can differentiate between the two methods by remembering that the p in .strptime() stands for parse , and the f in .strftime() stands for format .

In your PyCon countdown, you can use .strftime() to print output to let the user know the date on which PyCon US will start. Remember, you can find the formatting codes that you want to use on strftime.org . Now add this code on line 18 of your PyCon countdown script:

In this code, line 18 uses .strftime() to create a string representing the starting date of PyCon US 2021. The output includes the weekday, month, day, year, hour, minute, AM or PM, and time zone:

On line 19 , you print this string for the user to see with some explanatory text. The last line prints the amount of time remaining until the PyCon start date. Next, you’ll finish your script to make it easier for other people to reuse.

The final step that you’ll want take is to follow Python best practices and put the code that produces output into a main() function. You can check out the full, final code after applying all these changes:

In this code, you move print() and the code used for the generator into main() . On line 23 , you use the guard clause to make sure that main() only runs when this file is executed as a script . This allows other people to import your code and reuse PYCON_DATE , for instance, if they’d like.

Now you can modify this script as much as you want. One neat thing to do might be to allow the user to change the time zone associated with now by passing a command-line argument . You could also change the PYCON_DATE to something closer to home, say PyCon Africa or EuroPython .

To get even more excited about PyCon, check out Real Python at PyCon US 2019 and How to Get the Most Out of PyCon !

Python datetime and dateutil are a powerful combination of libraries when you’re working with dates and times. dateutil is even recommended in the Python documentation. However, there are many other libraries that you can use to work with dates and times in Python. Some of these rely on datetime and dateutil , while others are completely independent replacements:

• pytz provides time zone information similar to dateutil . It uses a somewhat different interface than the standard datetime.tzinfo , so be aware of the potential problems if you decide to use it.
• Arrow provides a drop-in replacement for datetime . It’s inspired by moment.js , so if you’re coming from web development, then this might be a more familiar interface.
• Pendulum provides another drop-in replacement for datetime . It includes a time zone interface and an improved timedelta implementation.
• Maya provides a similar interface as datetime . It relies on Pendulum for parts of the parsing library.
• dateparser provides an interface to generate datetime instances from human-readable text. It’s flexible and supports many languages.

In addition, if you work heavily with NumPy , Pandas , or other data science packages, then there are a few options that might be useful to you:

• NumPy provides a similar API to the built-in Python datetime library, but the NumPy version can be used in arrays.
• Pandas provides support for time-series data in DataFrames , usually sequential values of time-based events, by using the NumPy datetime module.
• cftime provides support for calendars other than the proleptic Gregorian calendar as well as other time units conforming to the Climate and Forecasting (CF) conventions. It’s used by the xarray package to provide time-series support.

Since programming with time can be so complicated, there are many resources on the web to help you learn more about it. Fortunately, this is a problem that many people who work in every programming language have thought about, so you can usually find information or tools to help with any problem you may have. Here’s a selected list of articles and videos that I found helpful in writing this tutorial:

• Computerphile: The Problem with Time & Timezones

In addition, Paul Ganssle is a core contributor to CPython and the current maintainer of dateutil . His articles and videos are a great resource for Python users:

• Working with Time Zones: Everything You Wish You Didn’t Need to Know (PyCon 2019)
• pytz: The Fastest Footgun in the West
• Stop using utcnow and utcfromtimestamp
• A curious case of non-transitive datetime comparison

In this tutorial, you learned about programming with dates and times and why it often leads to errors and confusion. You also learned about the Python datetime and dateutil modules as well as how to work with time zones in your code.

Now you can:

• Store dates in a good, future-proof format in your programs
• Create Python datetime instances with formatted strings
• Add time zone information to datetime instances with dateutil
• Perform arithmetic operations with datetime instances using relativedelta

In the end, you created a script that counts down the time remaining until the next PyCon US so you can get excited for the biggest Python gathering around. Dates and times can be tricky, but with these Python tools in your arsenal, you’re ready to tackle the toughest problems!

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Python Programming

Python DateTime Format Using Strftime()

Updated on:  May 6, 2022 | 3 Comments

This tutorial will teach how to represent date and time into various formats in Python using the strftime() function of a datetime module and time module.

The strftime() method returns a string representing of a datetime object according to the format codes.

Table of contents

Example: convert datetime to string format, represent dates in numerical format, represent dates in textual format, convert only date to string, represent time in 24-hours and 12-hours format, represent time in microseconds format, represent datetime in milliseconds, represent time in am/pm format, format time object to string using time module, convert datetime to locale’s format, convert datetime in iso string format, converting datetime to int, convert datetime to float, how to format date and time in python.

In Python, the date and time values are stored as datetime objects, but there are cases where we need to print the datetime objects into various string formats for better readability. For example, you may need to represent a date numerically in format, like “ 17-06-2021 “. On the other hand, you want to convert dates in textual string format like “ Tuesday, 23 June 2021 .” The below steps show how to convert a datetime to string format using the strftime() function

Python’s datetime module provides functions that handle many complex functionalities involving the date and time. Import datetime class using a from datetime import datetime statement.

Use datetime.strftime(format) to convert a datetime object into a string as per the corresponding format . The format codes are standard directives for mentioning in which format you want to represent datetime. For example, the %d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S codes convert date to dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss format.

Use this step if you want to convert a time object to string format. like, hours minutes seconds ( hh:mm:ss ). Use the time.strptime(string[, format]) function to convert a time object to a string format.

• First, get the current datetime the now() function
• Next, use the strftime() with appropriate format codes.

Let us see the example to convert today’s datetime in string format of YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss

Also, refer to convert a string to DateTime in Python

Convert individual attributes of a datetim e object to a string format : –

For example, you can convert only date, time, year, or day from a datetime object to a string using the appropriate format code.

strftime() Date Format Codes

Dates have a default representation, but you may want to print them in a specific format. In that case, you can get a custom string representation using the different format codes

The strftime() uses some standard directives to represent a datetime in a string format. The same set of directives are shared between both the strptime() and strftime() methods.

Below are the character codes to format the date and time:-

• %d : Returns the day of the month, from 1 to 31.
• %m : Returns the month of the year, from 1 to 12.
• %Y : Returns the year in four-digit format ( Year with century). like, 2021.
• %y : Reurns year in two-digit format ( year without century). like, 19, 20, 21
• %A : Returns the full name of the weekday . Like, Monday, Tuesday
• %a : Returns the short name of the weekday (First three character.). Like, Mon, Tue
• %B : Returns the full name of the month . Like, June, March
• %b : Returns the short name of the month (First three character.). Like, Mar, Jun
• %H : Returns the hour . from 01 to 23.
• %I : Returns the hour in 12-hours format. from 01 to 12.
• %M : Returns the minute , from 00 to 59.
• %S : Returns the second , from 00 to 59.
• %f : Return the microseconds from 000000 to 999999
• %p : Return time in AM/PM format
• %c : Returns a locale’s appropriate date and time representation
• %x : Returns a locale’s appropriate date representation
• %X : Returns a locale’s appropriate time representation
• %z : Return the UTC offset in the form ±HHMM[SS[.ffffff]] (empty string if the object is naive).
• %Z : Return the Time zone name (empty string if the object is naive).
• %j : Returns the day of the year from 01 to 366
• %w : Returns weekday as a decimal number, where 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday.
• %U : Returns the week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the week) from 00 to 53
• %W : Returns the week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the week) from 00 to 53

We have seen how to convert dates to strings using the default format codes. Now we can see more combinations with examples for a better understanding of the format codes that you can use to format dates in Python.

The numerical format means to display the day, month, year, hours, minutes, seconds in numbers. like, 2021-07-07 12:19:47.864519

The textual format means to display the month name and day name . like, Wednesday,07 July, 2021 . You can print the full name and short name of a day and month.

• %A : Full name of the  day . Like, Monday
• %a : Short name of the  day . Like, Mon, Tue
• %B : Full name of the  month . Like, December
• %b : Short name of the  month . Like, Mar

The strftime() method can be called using the date , time , or datetime objects. Let’s how to format only date object of a datetime module to string.

Note : You can also extract date object from a datetime object and convert it to a string if required.

Convert Time Object to String Format

Same as the date object you can convert the time object of a datetime module to a string.

• Use the time() constructor to create a time object Or
• Extract the time object from a datetime object using the datetime.time() method.

Let’s see how to format DateTime to print time in hours, minutes, and seconds, and microsecond format.

• Use the % H -%M-%S format code to display time in 24-hours format
• Use the % I -%M-%S format code to display time in 12-hours format
• Use the %f format code to represent time in microsecond
• Use the %p format code to represent time in AM/PM format

As there is no formatting code available for milliseconds, we can only display it using the %S code. However, as milliseconds are 3 decimal places away from seconds, we can display that information by combining %S with %f .

Use the %p format code to represent time in AM/PM format.

• For time objects, the format codes for the year, month, and day should not be used, as time objects have no such values. If they’re used anyway, 1900 is substituted for the year, and 1 for the month and day.
• For date objects, the format codes for hours, minutes, seconds, and microseconds should not be used, as date objects have no such values. If they’re used anyway, 0 is substituted for them.

The time module provides various time-related functions. If you are using a time module in your application and wanted to format the time object to string representation, then use the strftime() method available in the time module.

This is just similar to the datetime module’s method except that it accepts a two arguments.

This method converts a tuple or struct_time representing a time as returned by gmtime() or localtime() to a string as specified by the format argument.

The strftime() method of a time module takes two parameters:

• format : The format code. It must be string
• t : The time tuple that needs to be converted to a string.

Example : Converting the current time to string using the time.strftime() method.

The %c directive returns a  locale’s appropriate date and time  representation of a given datetime object.

We can display the datetime in an ISO 8601 format String. In the ISO 8601 string, the timezone is displayed as a UTC offset. We can do this by using the %z and %Z format directive. For this requirement, we can use the pytz for getting the timezone name.

• Get the current datetime using the datetime.now() function
• Assign the timezone to the current timestamp using the datetime.fromtimestamp()
• Us the %Z format directive to display the datetime in ISO 8601 format.

We have seen how to display the datetime in different formats as a string, but there will be requirements to store it as an integer. This is equivalent to adding all the values in the date and time with their place values.

This can be done by simply giving their format strings together without space. It will add the values along with their place values.

We can convert the datetime String to float with a precision of microseconds. Or store the date and time information separately as well.

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About Vishal

I’m  Vishal Hule , the Founder of PYnative.com. As a Python developer, I enjoy assisting students, developers, and learners. Follow me on  Twitter .

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Python Get Current time

There are a number of ways we can take to get the current date. We will use the date class of the datetime module to accomplish this task.

• Example 1: Python get today's date

Here, we imported the date class from the datetime module. Then, we used the date.today() method to get the current local date.

• Example 2: Current date in different formats
• Get the current date and time in Python

If we need to get the current date and time, you can use the datetime class of the datetime module.

Here, we have used datetime.now() to get the current date and time.

Then, we used strftime() to create a string representing date and time in another format.

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Python Datetime - Exercises, Practice, Solution

Python datetime [63 exercises with solution].

The datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and times in both simple and complex ways.

You may read our Python date and time tutorial before solving the following exercises.

[ An editor is available at the bottom of the page to write and execute the scripts.   Go to the editor ]

1. Write a Python script to display the various Date Time formats - a) Current date and time b) Current year c) Month of year d) Week number of the year e) Weekday of the week f) Day of year g) Day of the month h) Day of week

Click me to see the solution

2. Write a Python program to determine whether a given year is a leap year.

3. Write a Python program to convert a string to datetime. Sample String : Jul 1 2014 2:43PM Expected Output : 2014-07-01 14:43:00

4. Write a Python program to get the current time in Python. Sample Format :  13:19:49.078205

5. Write a Python program to subtract five days from the current date. Sample Date : Current Date : 2015-06-22 5 days before Current Date : 2015-06-17

6. Write a Python program to convert a Unix timestamp string to a readable date. Sample Unix timestamp string : 1284105682 Expected Output : 2010-09-10 13:31:22

8. Write a Python program to convert the date to datetime (midnight of the date) in Python. Sample Output : 2015-06-22 00:00:00

9. Write a Python program to print the next 5 days starting today.

10. Write a Python program to add 5 seconds to the current time. Sample Data : 13:28:32.953088 13:28:37.953088

11. Write a Python program to convert Year/Month/Day to Day of Year in Python.

12. Write a Python program to get the current time in milliseconds in Python.

13. Write a Python program to get the week number. Sample Date : 2015, 6, 16 Expected Output : 25

14. Write a Python program to find the date of the first Monday of a given week. Sample Year and week : 2015, 50 Expected Output : Mon Dec 14 00:00:00 2015

15. Write a Python program to select all the Sundays in a specified year. Click me to see the solution

16. Write a Python program to add year(s) to a given date and display the updated date. Sample Data : (addYears is the user defined function name) print(addYears(datetime.date(2015,1,1), -1)) print(addYears(datetime.date(2015,1,1), 0)) print(addYears(datetime.date(2015,1,1), 2)) print(addYears(datetime.date(2000,2,29),1)) Expected Output : 2014-01-01 2015-01-01 2017-01-01 2001-03-01

17. Write a Python program to drop microseconds from datetime.

18. Write a Python program to get days between two dates. Sample Dates : 2000,2,28, 2001,2,28 Expected Output : 366 days, 0:00:00

19. Write a Python program to get the date of the last Tuesday.

20. Write a Python program to test the third Tuesday of a month.

21. Write a Python program to get the last day of a specified year and month.

22. Write a Python program to get the number of days in a given month and year.

23. Write a Python program to add a month to a specified date.

24. Write a Python program to count the number of Mondays on the 1st day of the month from 2015 to 2016.

25. Write a Python program to print a string five times, with a delay of three seconds..

26. Write a Python program that calculates the date six months from the current date using the datetime module.

27. Write a Python program to create 12 fixed dates from a specified date over a given period. The difference between two dates is 20.

28. Write a Python program to get the dates 30 days before and after today.

29. Write a Python program to get GMT and the local time.

30. Write a Python program to convert a date to a timestamp.

31. Write a Python program to convert a string date to a timestamp.

32. Write a Python program to calculate the number of days between two dates.

33. Write a Python program to calculate the number of days between two date times.

34. Write a Python program to display the date and time in a human-friendly string.

35. Write a Python program to convert a date to a Unix timestamp.

36. Write a Python program to calculate the difference between two dates in seconds.

37. Write a Python program to convert difference of two dates into days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

38. Write a Python program to get the last modified information of a file.

39. Write a Python program to calculate an age in years.

40. Write a Python program to get the current date and time information.

41. Write a Python program to generate a date and time as a string.

42. Write a Python program to display formatted text output of a month and start the week on Sunday.

43. Write a Python program to print a 3-column calendar for an entire year.

44. Write a Python program to display a calendar for a locale.

45. Write a Python program to get the current week.

46. Write a Python program to create a HTML calendar with data for a specific year and month.

47. Write a Python program display a list of the dates for the 2nd Saturday of every month for a given year.

48. Write a Python program to display a simple, formatted calendar of a given year and month.

49. Write a Python program to convert a string into datetime

50. Write a Python program to get a list of dates between two dates.

51. Write a Python program to generate RFC 3339 timestamp.

52. Write a Python program to get the first and last second.

53. Write a Python program to validate a Gregorian date. The month is between 1 and 12 inclusive, the day is within the allowed number of days for the given month. Leap year's are taken into consideration. The year is between 1 and 32767 inclusive.

54. Write a Python program to set the default timezone used by all date/time functions.

55. The epoch is the point where time starts, and is platform dependent. For Unix, the epoch is January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 (UTC). Write a Python program to find out what the epoch is on a given platform. Convert a given time in seconds since the epoch. Sample Output: Epoch on a given platform: time.struct_time(tm_year=1970, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0) Time in seconds since the epoch: time.struct_time(tm_year=1970, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0)

56. Write a Python program to get time values with components using local time and gmtime. Sample Output: localtime: tm_year : 2021 tm_mon : 4 tm_mday : 13 tm_hour : 11 tm_min : 20 tm_sec : 37 tm_wday : 1 tm_yday : 103 tm_isdst: 0 gmtime: tm_year : 2021 tm_mon : 4 tm_mday : 13 tm_hour : 11 tm_min : 20 tm_sec : 37 tm_wday : 1 tm_yday : 103 tm_isdst: 0

57. Write a Python program to get different time values with components timezone, timezone abbreviations, the offset of the local (non-DST) timezone, DST timezone and time of different timezones. Sample Output: Default Zone: TZ : (not set) Timezone abbreviations: ('UTC', 'UTC') Timezone : 0 (0.0) DST timezone 0 Time : 11:30:05 04/13/21 UTC Pacific/Auckland : TZ : Pacific/Auckland Timezone abbreviations: ('NZST', 'NZDT') Timezone : -43200 (-12.0) DST timezone 1 Time : 23:30:05 04/13/21 NZST Europe/Berlin : TZ : Europe/Berlin Timezone abbreviations: ('CET', 'CEST') Timezone : -3600 (-1.0) DST timezone 1 Time : 13:30:05 04/13/21 CEST America/Detroit : TZ : America/Detroit Timezone abbreviations: ('EST', 'EDT') Timezone : 18000 (5.0) DST timezone 1 Time : 07:30:05 04/13/21 EDT Singapore : TZ : Singapore Timezone abbreviations: ('+08', '+08') Timezone : -28800 (-8.0) DST timezone 0 Time : 19:30:05 04/13/21 +08

58. Write a Python program that can suspend execution of a given script for a given number of seconds. Sample Output: Sorry, Slept for 3 seconds... Sorry, Slept for 3 seconds... Sorry, Slept for 3 seconds... Sorry, Slept for 3 seconds...

59. Write a Python program to convert a given time in seconds since the epoch to a string representing local time. Sample Output: Tue Apr 13 11:51:51 2021 Thu Jun 30 18:36:29 1977

60. Write a Python program that prints the time, names, representation format, and the preferred date time format in a simple format. Sample Output: Simple format of time: Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:02:01 + 1010 Full names and the representation: Tuesday, 04/13/21 April 2021 12:02:01 + 0000 Preferred date time format: Tue Apr 13 12:02:01 2021 Example 11: 04/13/21, 12:02:01, 21, 2021

61. Write a Python program that takes a given number of seconds and passes since the epoch as an argument. Print structure time in local time. Sample Output: Result: time.struct_time(tm_year=1983, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=21, tm_min=38, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) Year: 1983

62. Write a Python program that takes a tuple containing 9 elements corresponding to structure time as an argument and returns a string representing it. Sample Output: Result: Sun Jan 22 02:34:06 2020 Result: Tue Nov 12 02:54:08 1982

63. Write a Python program to parse a string representing time and return the time structure. Sample Output: String representing time: 22 January, 2020 time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=22, tm_isdst=-1) String representing time: 30 Nov 00 time.struct_time(tm_year=2000, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=335, tm_isdst=-1) String representing time: 04/11/15 11:55:23 time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=11, tm_min=55, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=101, tm_isdst=-1) String representing time: 12-11-2019 time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=345, tm_isdst=-1) String representing time: 13::55::26 time.struct_time(tm_year=1900, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=13, tm_min=55, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=-1)

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How do I adjust my code to parse dates with dashes?

So in Python, I'm trying to create a File checker. I have 2 inputs : filename and the pattern. The filepattern will always have the date pattern enclosed in { }

For example,

filename : File_20240621

pattern : File_{YYYYMMDD}

The function should extract the date from the filename. So in this case, it will return 20240621.

Now, what I need this function to do is become flexible to account for various date formats for example YYYYMMDD, MMDD, DDMM, YYYY, MM, DD, as well as dates with Dashes in them YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM, MM-DD

This is the current function I have but it does not work on dates with dashes, will anyone be able to help me on this?

• date-parsing

• see here or here maybe? –  DuesserBaest Commented 21 hours ago

I suggest you take a look at pythons datetime module and its datetime.strptime(...) function. It allows you to parse timestamps.

I modified you function slightly to use the datetime modules format strings. You can find the description of the used characters here . After extracting the timestamp string (I adjusted the regex for that) it is parsed by the datetime module so you have the flexibility to support more formats later on.

• Hi, for some reason I am getting this error ValueError: time data '2024-06-12.csv' does not match format 'YYYY-MM-DD' , it is capturing .csv after the date –  tootiefairy Commented 20 hours ago
• You have two options: 1. Strip the file extension from the filename in the first line of extract_date_from_filename() 2. Modify the pattern extraction regex (currently (\S+) to only match text like this ([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+) Note : I think you are using a pattern like YYYY-MM-DD but you pattern can only use the selectors from the link I attached to my response. The pattern YYYY-MM-DD must actually be %Y-%m-%d –  derteufelqwe Commented 19 hours ago

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Answer to Question #174121 in Python for CHANDRASENA REDDY CHADA

Given two dates D1 and D2, write a program to count the number of Saturdays and Sundays from D1 to D2 (including D1 and D2).

The date in string format is like "8 Feb 2021".Input

The first line of input will contain date D1 in the string format.

The second line of input will contain date D2 in the string format.

The output should be a single line containing two integers separated by space

Explanation

For example, if the given dates are "25 Jan 2021" and "14 Feb 2021", the Saturdays and Sundays dates from "25 Jan 2021" to "14 Feb 2021" are

"30 Jan 2021" is a Saturday

"31 Jan 2021" is a Sunday

"6 Feb 2021" is a Saturday

"7 Feb 2021" is a Sunday

"13 Feb 2021" is a Saturday

"14 Feb 2021" is a Sunday

Saturday: 3

Sample Input 1

25 Jan 2021

14 Feb 2021

Sample Output 1

Sample Input 2

25 May 2019

22 Dec 2021

Sample Output 2

Saturday: 135

Sunday: 135

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weekday() Function Of Datetime.date Class In Python

The weekday() of datetime.date class function is used to return the integer value corresponding to the specified day of the week.

Syntax: weekday() Parameters: This function does not accept any parameter. Return values: This function returns the integer mapping corresponding to the specified day of the week. Below table shows the integer values corresponding to the day of the week.

Example 1: Getting the integer values corresponding to the specified days of the week.

Example 2: Getting the date and time along with the day’s name of the entire week.

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