Python Datetime - The 9 Tips You Shall Know

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

Introduction

Dealing with date and time are quite common whenever you are writing Python scripts, for instance, the simplest use cases would be logging some events with a timestamp, or saving a file with date and timing info in the file name. It can be challenging when you have more complicated scenarios such as handling time zone, daylight saving and recurrences etc. The built-in Python datetime module is capable of handling most of the date and time operations, and there are third party libraries can help you to easily manage the time zone and daylight saving challenges. In this article, we will be discussion some tips for using the Python datetime module as well as the third party package dateutil.

Prerequisite

If you do not have dateutil installed yet, you shall install the latest version to your working environment. Below is the pip command to install the package:

pip install python-dateutil

Let’s get started!

Various ways to get current date and time

The top one use cases that you need a Python datetime object is to get the current date or time. There are plenty of ways to get current date and time from Python datetime module, for instance: