Python: Get current date and time

Today’s post is about finding today’s date and time using Python. This script queries local system for today’s date and time in local time zone.

We will be using python built-in module called datetime for this purpose. This module has a function called now() which will return a date time object. Let see how it looks like.

import datetime as dt
dt.datetime.now()

If you execute above lines of code from Python REPL, you will see that it returns a date time object as shown below.

As you can see in the output it returned datetime in object format. It is very convenient to use this object if you are going to consume this further in your scripts. However, at times we want to print the time that humans can easily understand. For example, you want to print date time in MM-DD-YYYY format. To do that we can use strftime() method which is available on the datetime object. Let us see how to use it.

import datetime as dt
date = dt.datetime.now()
print("Today's date time : {0}".format(date.strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H-%M-%S")))
print("Today's date time : {0}".format(date.strftime("%D %T")))

Notes:

1. When used with the strptime() function, the %p directive only affects the output hour field if the %I directive is used to parse the hour.
2. The range really is 0 to 61; this accounts for leap seconds and the (very rare) double leap seconds.
3. When used with the strptime() function, %U and %W are only used in calculations when the day of the week and the year are specified.

Hope this article is helpful.