Python DateTime, TimeDelta, Strftime(Format) with Examples

While working with real-time applications, you have a lot to do with date and time. For example, an inventory management system you have to keep track of when a specific product was received and sold. You have to print statements at specific intervals. In all these tasks data and time are used.

Python provides a ‘DateTime’ class under which 5 major classes are defined.

• ‘date’ – used to get just date ( Month, day, year)
• ‘time’ – Time independent of the day (Hour, minute, second, microsecond)
• ‘datetime’ – Both time and date (Month, day, year, hour, second, microsecond)
• ‘timedelta’— A duration of time used for manipulating dates
• ‘tzinfo’— An abstract class for dealing with time zones

DateTime

Let’s take a look at how to get data and time. For using data and time we need to import the following.

From datetime import date
print(date.today())

We can access the year, month and the day separately. Let’s have a look at the example.

from datetime import date
today = date.today()
print("day",today.day)
print("Month",today.month)
print("Year",today.year)

The following will be the output.

For the current date and time will use “datetime.now()” function.

from datetime import datetime
print(datetime.now())

TimeDelta

Python timedelta() function is present under DateTime library which is generally used for calculating differences in dates and also can be used for date manipulations in Python.

Let’s take a look at an example.

from datetime import timedelta
print (timedelta(days=200, hours=4, minutes=5))

The output of the above code is shown below.

Let’s take a look at some practical example. Let’s print today date one year from now.

Strftime(Format)

The strftime() method is used to get a string representing date and time using date, time or DateTime object.

1. %C- indicates the local date and time
2. %x- indicates the local date
3. %X- indicates the local time
4. %Y- indicates the year
5. %m- indicates the month
6. %d- indicates the day

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now() # current date and time

year = now.strftime("%Y")
print("year:", year)

month = now.strftime("%m")
print("month:", month)

day = now.strftime("%d")
print("day:", day)

time = now.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("time:", time)

date_time = now.strftime("%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M:%S")
print("date and time:",date_time)

The “strftime function” can also be used to print time in any format 24 hours or 12 hours.

Let’s take a look at an example.

12 hours time is declared [print now.strftime(“%I:%M”) ]

24 hours time is declared [print now.strftime(“%H:%M”)]

from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()
print("12 hours",now.strftime("%I:%M"))
print("24 hours",now.strftime("%H:%M"))