Python Date and Time with examples

Hello dear readers! Welcome back to another edition of our tutorial on Python. In this tutorial guide, we are going to be discussing about the Python Date and Time.

A Python program can handle date and time in a number of ways. Converting between date formats is a common chore for computers. The Python's time and calendar module help track dates and time.

What is Tick?

Time intervals are floating - point numbers which are in the units of seconds. A specific instant in time are expressed in seconds since 12:00am, January 1, 1970.

There is a well known Python time module that provides functions to work with times and for converting between different depictions. The Python module time.time() returns the current time in ticks since 12:00am, January 1, 1970.

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Example

The following below is a simple example -

#!/usr/bin/python
import time;  # This is required to include time module.

ticks = time.time()
print "Number of ticks since 12:00am, January 1, 1970:", ticks

Output

Below is the output of the above example -

Number of ticks since 12:00am, January 1, 1970: 7186862.73399

Date arithmetic is very easy to do with ticks. But the dates before the epoch can not be represented in this form. Dates in the far future also can not be represented in this form. The cut off point is said to be sometime in 2038 for UNIX and Windows.

What is Time Tuple?

Many Python time function handle time as a tuple of 9 numbers, as shown below -

Index	Field	Values
0	4-digit year	2008
1	Month	1 to 12
2	Day	1 to 31
3	Hour	0 to 23
4	Minute	0 to 59
5	Second	0 to 61 (60 or 61 are leap-seconds)
6	Day of Week	0 to 6 (0 is Monday)
7	Day of year	1 to 366 (Julian day)
8	Daylight savings	-1, 0, 1, -1 means library determines DST

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Above tuple is equal to struct_time structure. The structure has the following attributes -

Index	Attributes	Values
0	tm_year	2008
1	tm_mon	1 to 12
2	tm_mday	1 to 31
3	tm_hour	0 to 23
4	tm_min	0 to 59
5	tm_sec	0 to 61 (60 or 61 are leap-seconds)
6	tm_wday	0 to 6 (0 is Monday)
7	tm_yday	1 to 366 (Julian day)
8	tm_isdst	-1, 0, 1, -1 means library determines DST

Getting Current Time

To translate a time instant from a second since the epoch floating-point value into a time-tuple, then pass the floating-point value to the function (e.g., localtime) that returns a time-tuple with all nine items valid.

Example

The following below is a simple example -

#!/usr/bin/python
import time;

localtime = time.localtime(time.time())
print "Local current time :", localtime

Output

This would produce the following result, which could be formatted in any other orderly form -

Local current time : time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, 
tm_mday=13, tm_hour=15, tm_min=26, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=198, tm_isdst=0)

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Getting Formatted Time

You can format any time based on your needs, but the simple method to get time in a readable format is asctime -

Example

The following below is a simple example -

#!/usr/bin/python
import time;

localtime = time.asctime( time.localtime(time.time()) )
print "Local current time :", localtime

Output

Below is the output of the above example -

Local current time : Mon Jul 13 15:45:38 2020

Getting Calendar for a Month

The Python calendar module gives a wide range of methods to play with yearly and monthly calendars. Here, we print a calendar for a given month ( Jul 2020 ) -

#!/usr/bin/python
import calendar

cal = calendar.month(2020, 07)
print "Here is the calendar:"
print cal

Output

Below is the output of the above example -

Here is the calendar:
   July 2020
Mo   Tu   We   Th   Fr   Sa   Su
                   1     2     3     4     5
  6      7      8     9    10   11   12
13    14    15   16   17   18   19
20    21    22   23   24   25   26
27    28    29   30   31

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The Time Module

There is a well known Python time module that provides functions to work with times and also used for converting between presentations. Here is a list of all the available methods -

Sr.No.	Function with Description
1	time.altzone The offset of the local DST timezone, in seconds west of UTC, if one is defined. This is negative if the local DST timezone is east of UTC (as in Western Europe, including the UK). Only use this if daylight is nonzero.
2	time.asctime([tupletime]) Accepts a time-tuple and returns a readable 24-character string such as 'Tue Dec 11 18:07:14 2008'.
3	time.clock( ) Returns the current CPU time as a floating-point number of seconds. To measure computational costs of different approaches, the value of time.clock is more useful than that of time.time().
4	time.ctime([secs]) Like asctime(localtime(secs)) and without arguments is like asctime( )
5	time.gmtime([secs]) Accepts an instant expressed in seconds since the epoch and returns a time-tuple t with the UTC time. Note : t.tm_isdst is always 0
6	time.localtime([secs]) Accepts an instant expressed in seconds since the epoch and returns a time-tuple t with the local time (t.tm_isdst is 0 or 1, depending on whether DST applies to instant secs by local rules).
7	time.mktime(tupletime) Accepts an instant expressed as a time-tuple in local time and returns a floating-point value with the instant expressed in seconds since the epoch.
8	time.sleep(secs) Suspends the calling thread for secs seconds.
9	time.strftime(fmt[,tupletime]) Accepts an instant expressed as a time-tuple in local time and returns a string representing the instant as specified by string fmt.
10	time.strptime(str,fmt='%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y') Parses str according to format string fmt and returns the instant in time-tuple format.
11	time.time( ) Returns the current time instant, a floating-point number of seconds since the epoch.
12	time.tzset() Resets the time conversion rules used by the library routines. The environment variable TZ specifies how this is done.

In our subsequent tutorials, we are going to be discussing about each of the above methods.

Following below are two important attributes available with the time module -

Sr.No.	Attribute with Description
1	time.timezone Attribute time.timezone is the offset in seconds of the local time zone (without DST) from UTC (>0 in the Americas; <=0 in most of Europe, Asia, Africa).
2	time.tzname Attribute time.tzname is a pair of locale-dependent strings, which are the names of the local time zone without and with DST, respectively.

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The Calendar Module

Python calendar module supplies various calendar related functions, including functions for printing a text calendar for a given month or year.

By default, calendar takes Monday as the first day of the week and Sunday as the last. To change this, call the calendar.setfirstweekday() function.

The following below is the list of the modules available with the calendar module -

Sr.No.	Function with Description
1	calendar.calendar(year,w=2,l=1,c=6) Returns a multiline string with a calendar for year year formatted into three columns separated by c spaces. w is the width in characters of each date; each line has length 21*w+18+2*c. l is the number of lines for each week.
2	calendar.firstweekday( ) Returns the current setting for the weekday that starts each week. By default, when calendar is first imported, this is 0, meaning Monday.
3	calendar.isleap(year) Returns True if year is a leap year; otherwise, False.
4	calendar.leapdays(y1,y2) Returns the total number of leap days in the years within range(y1,y2).
5	calendar.month(year,month,w=2,l=1) Returns a multiline string with a calendar for month month of year year, one line per week plus two header lines. w is the width in characters of each date; each line has length 7*w+6. l is the number of lines for each week.
6	calendar.monthcalendar(year,month) Returns a list of lists of ints. Each sublist denotes a week. Days outside month month of year year are set to 0; days within the month are set to their day-of-month, 1 and up.
7	calendar.monthrange(year,month) Returns two integers. The first one is the code of the weekday for the first day of the month month in year year; the second one is the number of days in the month. Weekday codes are 0 (Monday) to 6 (Sunday); month numbers are 1 to 12.
8	calendar.prcal(year,w=2,l=1,c=6) Like print calendar.calendar(year,w,l,c).
9	calendar.prmonth(year,month,w=2,l=1) Like print calendar.month(year,month,w,l).
10	calendar.setfirstweekday(weekday) Sets the first day of each week to weekday code weekday. Weekday codes are 0 (Monday) to 6 (Sunday).
11	calendar.timegm(tupletime) The inverse of time.gmtime: accepts a time instant in time-tuple form and returns the same instant as a floating-point number of seconds since the epoch.
12	calendar.weekday(year,month,day) Returns the weekday code for the given date. Weekday codes are 0 (Monday) to 6 (Sunday); month numbers are 1 (January) to 12 (December).

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Alright guys! This is where we are rounding up for this tutorial post. In our next tutorial, we are going to be studying about the Python Time altzone() Method

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