How do i get the current time in python?

In this article, you will learn to get current time of your locale as well as different time zones in Python.

There are a number of ways you can take to get current time in Python.

Example 1: Current time using datetime object

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now()

current_time = now.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("Current Time =", current_time)

Output

Current Time = 07:41:19

In the above example, we have imported datetime class from the datetime module. Then, we used now() method to get a datetime object containing current date and time.

Using datetime.strftime() method, we then created a string representing current time.

If you need to create a time object containing current time, you can do something like this.

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now().time() # time object

print("now =", now)
print("type(now) =", type(now))	

Output

now = 07:43:37.457423
type(now) = 

Example 2: Current time using time module

You can also get the current time using time module.

import time

t = time.localtime()
current_time = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S", t)
print(current_time)

Output

07:46:58

Example 3: Current time of a timezone

If you need to find current time of a certain timezone, you can use pytZ module.

from datetime import datetime
import pytz

tz_NY = pytz.timezone('America/New_York') 
datetime_NY = datetime.now(tz_NY)
print("NY time:", datetime_NY.strftime("%H:%M:%S"))

tz_London = pytz.timezone('Europe/London')
datetime_London = datetime.now(tz_London)
print("London time:", datetime_London.strftime("%H:%M:%S"))

Output

NY time: 03:45:16
London time: 08:45:16

In this article, you will learn to get today's date and current date and time in Python. We will also format the date and time in different formats using strftime() method.

Video: Dates and Times in Python

There are a number of ways you can take to get the current date. We will use the date class of the datetime module to accomplish this task.

Example 1: Python get today's date

from datetime import date

today = date.today()
print("Today's date:", today)

Here, we imported the date class from the datetime module. Then, we used the date.today() method to get the current local date.

By the way, date.today() returns a date object, which is assigned to the today variable in the above program. Now, you can use the strftime() method to create a string representing date in different formats.

Example 2: Current date in different formats

from datetime import date

today = date.today()

# dd/mm/YY
d1 = today.strftime("%d/%m/%Y")
print("d1 =", d1)

# Textual month, day and year	
d2 = today.strftime("%B %d, %Y")
print("d2 =", d2)

# mm/dd/y
d3 = today.strftime("%m/%d/%y")
print("d3 =", d3)

# Month abbreviation, day and year	
d4 = today.strftime("%b-%d-%Y")
print("d4 =", d4)

When you run the program, the output will be something like:

d1 = 16/09/2019
d2 = September 16, 2019
d3 = 09/16/19
d4 = Sep-16-2019

If you need to get the current date and time, you can use datetime class of the datetime module.

Example 3: Get the current date and time

from datetime import datetime

# datetime object containing current date and time
now = datetime.now()
 
print("now =", now)

# dd/mm/YY H:M:S
dt_string = now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S")
print("date and time =", dt_string)	

You will gate output like below.

now = 2021-06-25 07:58:56.550604
date and time = 25/06/2021 07:58:56

Here, we have used datetime.now() to get the current date and time. Then, we used strftime() to create a string representing date and time in another format.

How do I get the current time in Python?

The time module

The time module provides functions that tell us the time in "seconds since the epoch" as well as other utilities.

import time

Unix Epoch Time

This is the format you should get timestamps in for saving in databases. It is a simple floating-point number that can be converted to an integer. It is also good for arithmetic in seconds, as it represents the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 00:00:00, and it is memory light relative to the other representations of time we'll be looking at next:

>>> time.time()
1424233311.771502

This timestamp does not account for leap-seconds, so it's not linear - leap seconds are ignored. So while it is not equivalent to the international UTC standard, it is close, and therefore quite good for most cases of record-keeping.

This is not ideal for human scheduling, however. If you have a future event you wish to take place at a certain point in time, you'll want to store that time with a string that can be parsed into a datetime object or a serialized datetime object (these will be described later).

time.ctime

You can also represent the current time in the way preferred by your operating system (which means it can change when you change your system preferences, so don't rely on this to be standard across all systems, as I've seen others expect). This is typically user friendly, but doesn't typically result in strings one can sort chronologically:

>>> time.ctime()
'Tue Feb 17 23:21:56 2015'

You can hydrate timestamps into human readable form with ctime as well:

>>> time.ctime(1424233311.771502)
'Tue Feb 17 23:21:51 2015'

This conversion is also not good for record-keeping (except in text that will only be parsed by humans - and with improved Optical Character Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, I think the number of these cases will diminish).

datetime module

The datetime module is also quite useful here:

>>> import datetime

datetime.datetime.now

The datetime.now is a class method that returns the current time. It uses the time.localtime without the timezone info (if not given, otherwise see timezone aware below). It has a representation (which would allow you to recreate an equivalent object) echoed on the shell, but when printed (or coerced to a str), it is in human readable (and nearly ISO) format, and the lexicographic sort is equivalent to the chronological sort:

>>> datetime.datetime.now()
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 17, 23, 43, 49, 94252)
>>> print(datetime.datetime.now())
2015-02-17 23:43:51.782461

datetime's utcnow

You can get a datetime object in UTC time, a global standard, by doing this:

>>> datetime.datetime.utcnow()
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 18, 4, 53, 28, 394163)
>>> print(datetime.datetime.utcnow())
2015-02-18 04:53:31.783988

UTC is a time standard that is nearly equivalent to the GMT timezone. (While GMT and UTC do not change for Daylight Savings Time, their users may switch to other timezones, like British Summer Time, during the Summer.)

datetime timezone aware

However, none of the datetime objects we've created so far can be easily converted to various timezones. We can solve that problem with the pytz module:

>>> import pytz
>>> then = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.utc)
>>> then
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 18, 4, 55, 58, 753949, tzinfo=)

Equivalently, in Python 3 we have the timezone class with a utc timezone instance attached, which also makes the object timezone aware (but to convert to another timezone without the handy pytz module is left as an exercise to the reader):

>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 18, 22, 31, 56, 564191, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

And we see we can easily convert to timezones from the original UTC object.

>>> print(then)
2015-02-18 04:55:58.753949+00:00
>>> print(then.astimezone(pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')))
2015-02-17 23:55:58.753949-05:00

You can also make a naive datetime object aware with the pytz timezone localize method, or by replacing the tzinfo attribute (with replace, this is done blindly), but these are more last resorts than best practices:

>>> pytz.utc.localize(datetime.datetime.utcnow())
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 18, 6, 6, 29, 32285, tzinfo=)
>>> datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 18, 6, 9, 30, 728550, tzinfo=)

The pytz module allows us to make our datetime objects timezone aware and convert the times to the hundreds of timezones available in the pytz module.

One could ostensibly serialize this object for UTC time and store that in a database, but it would require far more memory and be more prone to error than simply storing the Unix Epoch time, which I demonstrated first.

The other ways of viewing times are much more error-prone, especially when dealing with data that may come from different time zones. You want there to be no confusion as to which timezone a string or serialized datetime object was intended for.

If you're displaying the time with Python for the user, ctime works nicely, not in a table (it doesn't typically sort well), but perhaps in a clock. However, I personally recommend, when dealing with time in Python, either using Unix time, or a timezone aware UTC datetime object.

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