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How to Get the Current Date and Time in Python

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Python is a versatile programming language used to develop desktop and web applications. It allows you to work on complex projects.

Learn how to get current date and time in the python script with multiple options.

Get Current Date Time in Python with datetime Module

Use the command line to create and access a new file:

The system will tell you the file does not exist and ask you to create it. Click Yes and add the following in your text editor:

Save the file, then exit. Run the file by entering:

The result will show today’s date using the datetime module:

Options for datetime formating

Python has a number of options to configure the way date and time are formated.

Create a sample file:

Edit the file as follows:

Save the file and exit. Run the file by entering:

The system displays the date and time, the date, and the time on three separate lines.

Use strftime() to display Time and Date

The strftime() method returns a string displaying date and time using date, time or datetime object.

Enter the following command in your terminal window:

You have created a new file named python_time.py. Use this file to define the format of the information the system is to display.

To display the time in 24-hour format, enter:

This example image shows the file when using nano on a Debian distribution :

Save and close the file.

Execute the script by typing:

The result displays the time in the requested format:

To display the time in a 12-hour format, edit the file to:

Save and close the file.

Execute the script by typing:

Additional Options Using strftime

The strftime method accepts several formatting options.

First, create a new sample file:

Edit the file as follows:

Save the file and exit.

Run the file by typing:

An example of the result in Debian is below:

The strftime method has many formatting options. All the available options are in the official documentation.

This guide has shown you how to use Python to display the date and time. Python is pretty straightforward and offers multiple options (%X values) to show the date and time in different formats.

You now understand some basic concepts and can attempt to create more complex scripts.

Work with dates and times in Python using datetime

This usually means that we work with the datetime class inside the datetime module—somewhat confusing, but that’s why you’ll normally see things like datetime.datetime when looking at Python code that uses this.

What is a datetime object?

Put simply, a datetime object is one that stores information about a specific point in time. Information such as year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. With all that information, we can use a datetime object to refer to one particular moment in time. For example:

In addition to storing data about the specific point in time, it also has methods that help us interact with or process that data in a way that makes sense.

For example, given two datetime objects you can compare them to see which one is further into the future.

How to get today’s date

Because getting today’s date is so common, the datetime class comes with a method you can use to get a new datetime object for today’s date:

You can also use datetime.datetime.today() to get the current time and date, but it can sometimes be less precise. Also, it does now allow us to give it timezone information (more on that later!)

Notice that when we’re doing this, we get microseconds as well as the other time measures. This can be unnecessary, but when dealing with computers it can sometimes be useful.

How to modify dates

You can’t add two dates together, as that seldom makes sense. For example, what should happen if you add «today» to «today»?

Instead, when you want to change a date—for example by adding a few days to it—we use the timedelta class. A «delta» in mathematics means a «change», so that’s where the name comes from.

You can use timedelta with these arguments:

How to display dates

You can print dates or convert them to strings by using the built-in str() function, so that they’ll be shown in this format:

Sometimes you may want more flexibility regarding how you print it out. Maybe you only want to print out the date portion. Or maybe, just «hours and minutes».

Doing this does not modify the today object at all, it just creates a string representing the date or time as dictated by the «format string» passed.

This is a good reference for all different things you can pass to strftime : [https://strftime.org/](https://strftime.org/).

How to parse dates

Very similarly to printing dates with a specific format, we can read in dates with a specific format.

The same format strings as we used for strftime can be used in strptime

What is a timestamp?

A timestamp is the number of seconds that have passed since 1st January, 1970, at midnight.

We use timestamps because it is easier to work with a single number (albeit large) than with many numbers each describing a different measurement.

The timestamp for «2nd January, 1970, at midnight» would be 86400 : the number of seconds in one day.

To get a timestamp you can call the timestamp() method of any datetime object:

Because it is so common to get the timestamp of right now, we can use the time module to get it more easily:

Timezones

A timezone is a region where the same standard time is used.

For example, a lot of Western Europe uses the same standard time—Spain, France, Italy, Germany, etc. They are all in the «Central European Time» timezone. In Summer, when daylight savings are in effect, they are all in the «Central European Summer Time» timezone.

If you are running Python in a computer that is using CET, then doing datetime.datetime.now() would give you the local time of the computer.

However if you grab a different computer that is using Pacific Standard Time, then datetime.datetime.now() would give you a different time.

That is why it is important to tell the datetime objects what timezone the time they represent is in: so that no matter what computer is running the code, the time represented will always be the same.

We call that the «offset», and it is usually placed after a date and time. For example:

The above time is 11:54 with an offset of 1 hour.

That means that that timezone might be CET (or any other timezone with a +1 hour offset from UTC).

We can calculate the UTC time by subtracting 1 hour from the time, which would put us at 10:54.

Getting the current date and time in UTC

We’ve learned that you can get the local time like so:

You can see that in my case, the time is the same. That is because at the moment my timezone also has an offset of +00:00, so it matches UTC.

If your timezone does not match UTC, you’ll see those two times are different (indeed, the difference will be your timezone’s offset from UTC).

Naive vs. aware datetimes

If your datetime object knows what timezone the date and time it represents is in, then we call that an aware datetime object. If it doesn’t have timezone information, we call that a naive object.

Aware objects represent specific points in time in specific places in the world. Naive objects only represent specific points in time.

Note that working with naive objects can be dangerous because different pieces of code may interpret the naive object to be using a different timezone. For example, some of your code might use a naive object as if it were in UTC. Some other code might use a naive object as if it were in the current, local timezone.

Therefore it’s almost always a good idea to store timezone information in your datetime objects.

Converting from one timezone to another using pytz

You can convert from one timezone to another using the built-in datetime module, but you’ll need to tell Python what timezones exist and can be used by writing a class for each timezone that subclasses the datetime.tzinfo class. You’ll also have to do a lot of manual work so that your timezone classes keep track of daylight savings.

Alternatively you can use (and probably should use) the pytz module for working with timezones in your Python code.

Getting a timezone from pytz

The pytz module comes with a whole database of timezones, accessible by their official names:

Adding timezone information to a native datetime

If you have a naive datetime object (from the built-in module), you can use pytz to add timezone information:

Note that doing this does not change the time information in the datetime object.

Converting from one timezone to another

If you have an aware datetime object and you want to translate it to another timezone, then you can also do this with pytz :

Now the displayed time has changed because it’s the same date and time, but in a different timezone. Both eastern_time and amsterdam_time refer to the same exact point in time.

You can make sure of that by converting each to UTC yourself. Add 5 hours to eastern_time and subtract 1 hour from amsterdam_time to reach a +00:00 offset. You’ll see the times are identical.

Dealing with daylight savings

An example of this shown below

Working with dates and times in software applications

Usually I would recommend to always work in UTC in your applications. Ask the users for local time and timezone, and convert it to UTC. Store UTC in your database. Only change back to the user’s local time when you are displaying a date and time to them (and only if your users want to see times in their local time).

That way you will not have to worry about timezones within your application logic; only when dealing with user interaction.

The pytz module comes with a pytz.utc timezone that you can use when constructing datetime objects in order to simplify this:

As long as you always work with UTC, and only convert to the user’s local timezone when you are displaying information, it will be relatively simple!

Wrapping Up

If you want to learn more about Python as a whole, check out our Complete Python Course. It’s a 30-hour video-course that takes you from beginner to expert in Python. We’d love to see you there!

Jose Salvatierra

I’m a software engineer turned instructor! I founded Teclado to help me do this for everyone. I hope you enjoy the content!

Using Python datetime to Work With Dates and Times

Table of Contents

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:

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:

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.

How Computers Count Time

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.

How Standard Dates Can Be Reported

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:

How Time Should Be Stored in Your Program

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:

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:

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

Creating Python datetime Instances

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:

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:

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

Using Strings to Create Python datetime Instances

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?

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.

Starting Your PyCon Countdown

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:

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

Using dateutil to Add Time Zones to Python datetime

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:

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 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.

Comparing Naive and Aware Python datetime Instances

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)

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!

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 3.9 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.

Improving Your PyCon Countdown

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:

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.

Doing Arithmetic With Python datetime

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 :

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

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 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.

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.

Using relativedelta in Your PyCon Countdown

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.

Showing the PyCon Date in Your PyCon Countdown

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.

Finalizing Your PyCon Countdown

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:

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!

Alternatives to Python datetime and dateutil

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:

Further Reading

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:

Conclusion

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:

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!

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

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About Bryan Weber

Bryan is a core developer of Cantera, the open-source platform for thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, and transport. As a developer generalist, Bryan does Python from the web to data science and everywhere inbetween.

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How to Work with Python Date and Time Objects

At some point in your Python journey, you’ll definitely need to work with dates, times, or both. Learn all the basics of date and time in Python with this short tutorial.

Need to calculate how long it’s been since a given date? Working with date and time objects in Python? In this beginner’s guide, we’ll take a look at how to write programs with these two key data types in Python.

Python Datetime Classes

Python has five classes for working with date and time objects:

These classes are supplied in the datetime module. So you’ll need to start your work with date and time by importing all the required classes, like so:

Now let’s see what you can actually do with these classes.

Getting the Current Date and Time

First, it should come as no surprise that Python allows you to get the current date and time. You can also access the separate components of these objects.

This will return only today’s date without the exact time information. However, the date has a set of components that you can access individually using the corresponding attributes of the date object. As you can see in the example above, it’s possible to access the year, month, day, and even weekday.

Note that weekdays are provided as indices with 0 corresponding to Monday, 1 to Tuesday, 2 to Wednesday, and so on. So if you want to print the name of a weekday, you have two options:

Neither approach is more efficient than the other, so use whichever one you prefer!

Now let’s see how you can get the current time with Python, as well as access its individual components. Using the now() method of the datetime class, you’ll get the full information about the current time, including the date. You can get only time information by passing in the output of datetime.now() to the datetime.time() method. Take a look at this example:

Similar to how we manipulated the date object, you can access the individual components of a time object using the corresponding attributes. Thus, you can separately access the current hour, minute, second, and microsecond.

Creating Datetime Objects

Obviously, you can also create datetime objects in Python containing any plausible date and time from year 1 all the way up to year 9999. If you need an object that contains only date and no time information, simply pass in the year, month, and day to the date() function.

If we imagine for a second that the exact time of Einstein’s birth were known, we could create a datetime object that contains not only the date but also the time of the event. To create such an object, we would pass in the necessary arguments to the datetime() function—that is, the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond.

Note that year, month, and day are the only required arguments to the datetime() function; if you don’t provide the other arguments, they’ll be set to zero by default.

Formatting Datetimes

To change the format of your datetime object, you’ll simply need to pass in the appropriate format to the strftime() method. The format is expressed using special directives like the following:

Let’s see how we can play with different formats:

You can actually format time the same way, keeping in mind that:

Converting Strings into Datetime Objects

If dates or times in your dataset are represented as strings, you can actually easily convert them into datetime objects using the strptime() method. You simply need to specify the format in which your strings represent dates or times.

For example, let’s suppose that you need to extract dates from a body of text where these dates are represented as «March 25, 2019.» You’ll just need to pass in this string and the corresponding format to the strptime() method. Take a look:

Need more practice with converting strings into datetime objects in Python? Check out our course on working with strings in Python.

Comparing Datetime Objects

Let’s imagine that we know the exact birth time not only for Albert Einstein but also for Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. How do we compare date and time objects in Python?

Well, it’s actually very straightforward! You can compare date and datetime objects the same way you’d compare numbers: with the greater-than ( > ) and less-than ( ) operators.

Getting Time Intervals

So we know that Einstein was born after Newton, but how much later? Let’s find out!

As you can see from the example, you can calculate the difference between two date objects the same way you would with numbers. The result is expressed in days.

The delta that we calculated here is a timedelta object. It represents the difference between two dates or times. This difference can be expressed in days, seconds, microseconds, milliseconds, minutes, hours, and even weeks. Moreover, note that the result can be positive, negative, or zero.

Returning back to our physicists, let’s find out how many days passed between Einstein’s death and Hawking’s birth:

We got a negative result because Einstein died when Hawking was already 13 years old.

Creating timedelta Objects in Python

In the previous examples, timedelta objects resulted from our datetime arithmetic operations, but we can also create these objects explicitly and use them for defining new date and time objects. For example, given a specific date, we can calculate a new date by adding or subtracting a particular number of days, hours, weeks, etc.

Python Date and Time—Learned!

Now you know how to create datetime objects from scratch or from strings, how to get the current date and time, how to compare two dates, and how to format dates and times. You know all the basics, so your next step is to practice! And for that, be sure to check out our Python Basics Part 3 course; it has tons of interactive exercises and some quizzes related to date and time manipulation in Python.

You may also find it useful to check out Python Basics Part 1 and Python Basics Part 2 to refresh your knowledge of conditional statements, loops, lists, dictionaries, and other essential Python programming concepts.

If you want to observe considerable progress in your career, make sure to invest some time and effort in professional development and continuing education. You never know which of these newly acquired skills will play a crucial role in your next promotion—but they all definitely will!

Get Current Date And Time in Python

Introduction

Today in this tutorial, we are going to discuss how we can get the current date and time in Python programming.

Many times a user may need the current system date and time for various operations. This problem can be easily solved by the various built-in methods and modules in Python.

Further, python modules like pytz and pendulum allow the user to get the current date and time of a specified timezone. This feature is very helpful as it makes the code more reliable.

Ways to get Current Date And Time in Python

Now let us get right into understanding the different wants to get the current date and time in Python.

The datetime Module

The datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and times in Python.

In the example below, we try to fetch the current date using the today() method from the date class.

Output:

Here, today() returns the current local date. And simultaneously we print out the date.

Now let us look at another example. This time we are going to print both the local date and current time for the system using the datetime module.

Output:

In the code above,

Using pendulum Module

Pendulum is a timezone library that eases the datetime manipulation. Similar to the datetime module, the pendulum module also offers a now() method that returns the local date and time.

Pendulum can be easily installed using the PIP command:

Example,

Output:

As mentioned earlier, the now() method returns the current date and time as we can see from the above output.

Current Date and Time in Python for a Time Zone

When we talk about reliability or cross-platform code usability, Python offers tons of such features. In most of the cases, the user needs date or time for a specific timezone and using some modules like pytz or pendulum make working in such an environment much easier.

The pytz module brings the Olson tz database into Python as well as allows accurate and cross platform timezone calculations.

On the other hand, pendulum is a similar library which inherits from the datetime module. It uses a cleaner approach, making it faster than it’s counterpart( pytz ).

Both the modules can be installed using the following PIP commands,

For pytz module:

For pendulum module:

Example

Now let us take an example where we try to get and then print date as well as time for different timezones. This is going to be done using both the pytz and pendulum module.

Output:

Conclusion

So in this tutorial we learned about the various ways or techniques to get the current date and time in Python.

For any further questions, feel free to use the comments below.