Python date time format example

Date time is one of the most important object in any programming language, we often use date time in different format for logging and tracking user activities, In this article you will learn how to handle date time in python

There are various date time format in python, depend on your requirement you can also manipulate format.

When you work with MySQL, you may need to insert current date from python code, following is the easiest and supported format for mysql database

Python Date Format and Date Object

We need to import following classes

from datetime import date
from datetime import datetime

from datetime import date
from datetime import datetime

today=date.today()
tdate = today.isoformat();

Now if you want to change the date format for display or any other requirement, for example if you want a format like year/dd/mm , you can write like example below

today=date.today()
tdate = today.strftime("%Y/%d/%m")
print(tdate) #year-dd-mm

date output will be like

2019/15/12

Now if you want to get date with time, then use following code

date_time=datetime.now()
print(date_time)

date time result will be like

2019-12-15 07:34:58.988921

Get today's date object in python, then get day, month, year separately

from datetime import date
# Get today's date object

today = date.today() 

print("Current day:", today.day)
print("Current month:", today.month)
print("Current year:", today.year)

We can create python time object then can set different values from hour, minutes, seconds and milliseconds.

from datetime import time

# time(hour = 0, minute = 0, second = 0)
a = time()
print("example 1 =", a)

# time(hour, minute and second)
b = time(10, 28, 55)
print("example 2 =", b)

# time(hour, minute and second)
c = time(hour = 10, minute = 37, second = 46)
print("example 3 =", c)

# time(hour, minute, second, microsecond)
d = time(10, 46, 19, 540010)
print("example 4 =", d)

We also can combine date and time together using python datetime object .

from datetime import datetime

#datetime(year, month, day)
a = datetime(2020, 10, 28)
print(a)

# datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond)
b = datetime(2020, 10, 28, 19, 46, 55, 822350)
print(b)

Here is how you can find difference between two dates, or two datatimes

from datetime import datetime, date

// Date difference 
dt1 = date(2024, 10, 28)
today = date.today()
dateDiff = dt1 - today
print("Date Difference", dateDiff)

// datetime difference
dtime1 = datetime(year = 2024, month = 10, day = 28, hour = 10, minute = 37, second = 55)
dtime2 = datetime.now()
datetimeDiff = dtime1 - dtime2
print("date time difference", datetimeDiff)

Date time is very commonly used object in any programming language, there are many different format of date and time, though with above information you will be able to manage most of your work, but if you want to know more about python date functions take a look at different date time format in python example .