Python Datetime

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.

Import the datetime module and display the current date:

When we execute the code from the example above the result will be: The date contains year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond.

Here are a few examples, you will learn more about them later in this chapter:

Return the year and name of weekday:

To create a date, we can use the datetime() class (constructor) of the datetime module.

class requires three parameters to create a date: year, month, day.

class also takes parameters for time and timezone (hour, minute, second, microsecond, tzone), but they are optional, and has a default value of , ( None for timezone).

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:

Display the name of the month:

A reference of all the legal format codes:

%a Weekday, short version

Try it » %A Weekday, full version

Try it » %w

Try it » %d

31 Try it » %b Month name, short version

Try it » %B Month name, full version

Try it » %m

12 Try it » %y Year, short version, without century 18 Try it » %Y Year, full version 2018 Try it » %H

17 Try it » %I

05 Try it » %p

PM Try it » %M

41 Try it » %S

08 Try it » %f

548513 Try it » %z

+0100 %Z

%j

365 Try it » %U

52 Try it » %W

52 Try it » %c