HTML tutorial
CSS3 tutorial
Bootstrap tutorial
JavaScript tutorial
JQuery tutorial
AngularJS tutorial
React tutorial
NodeJS tutorial
PHP tutorial
Python tutorial
Python3 tutorial
Django tutorial
Linux tutorial
Docker tutorial
Ruby tutorial
Java tutorial
C tutorial
C ++ tutorial
Perl tutorial
JSP tutorial
Lua tutorial
Scala tutorial
Go tutorial
ASP.NET tutorial
C # tutorial
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
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:
import datetime
x = datetime.datetime.now()
print(x)
When we execute the code from the example above the result will be:
The date contains year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond.
The datetime
module has many methods to return information about the date
object.
Here are a few examples, you will learn more about them later in this chapter:
Return the year and name of weekday:
import datetime
x = datetime.datetime.now()
print(x.year)
print(x.strftime("%A"))
To create a date, we can use the datetime()
class (constructor) of the
datetime
module.
The datetime()
class requires three parameters to create a date: year,
month, day.
Create a date object:
import datetime
x = datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 17)
print(x)
The datetime()
class also takes parameters for time and timezone (hour,
minute, second, microsecond, tzone), but they are optional, and has a default
value of 0
, (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:
import datetime
x = datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 1)
print(x.strftime("%B"))
A reference of all the legal format codes:
Directive | Description | Example | Try it |
---|---|---|---|
%a | Weekday, short version | Wed | Try it » |
%A | Weekday, full version | Wednesday | Try it » |
%w | Weekday as a number 0-6, 0 is Sunday | 3 | Try it » |
%d | Day of month 01-31 | 31 | Try it » |
%b | Month name, short version | Dec | Try it » |
%B | Month name, full version | December | Try it » |
%m | Month as a number 01-12 | 12 | Try it » |
%y | Year, short version, without century | 18 | Try it » |
%Y | Year, full version | 2018 | Try it » |
%H | Hour 00-23 | 17 | Try it » |
%I | Hour 00-12 | 05 | Try it » |
%p | AM/PM | PM | Try it » |
%M | Minute 00-59 | 41 | Try it » |
%S | Second 00-59 | 08 | Try it » |
%f | Microsecond 000000-999999 | 548513 | Try it » |
%z | UTC offset | +0100 | |
%Z | Timezone | CST | |
%j | Day number of year 001-366 | 365 | Try it » |
%U | Week number of year, Sunday as the first day of week, 00-53 | 52 | Try it » |
%W | Week number of year, Monday as the first day of week, 00-53 | 52 | Try it » |
%c | Local version of date and time | Mon Dec 31 17:41:00 2018 | Try it » |
%C | Century | 20 | Try it » |
%x | Local version of date | 12/31/18 | Try it » |
%X | Local version of time | 17:41:00 | Try it » |
%% | A % character | % | Try it » |
%G | ISO 8601 year | 2018 | Try it » |
%u | ISO 8601 weekday (1-7) | 1 | Try it » |
%V | ISO 8601 weeknumber (01-53) | 01 | Try it » |