Python - Date & Time

A Python program can handle date and time in several ways. Converting between date formats is a common chore for computers. Python’s time and calendar modules help track dates and times.

What is Tick?

Time intervals are floating-point numbers in units of seconds. Particular instants in time are expressed in seconds since 12:00am, January 1, 1970(epoch).

There is a popular time module available in Python which provides functions for working with times, and for converting between representations. The function time.time() returns the current system time in ticks since 12:00am, January 1, 1970(epoch).

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

This would produce a result something as follows −

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

Date arithmetic is easy to do with ticks. However, dates before the epoch cannot be represented in this form. Dates in the far future also cannot be represented this way - the cutoff point is sometime in 2038 for UNIX and Windows.

What is TimeTuple?

Many of Python’s time functions handle time as a tuple of 9 numbers, as shown below −

The above tuple is equivalent to struct_time structure. This structure has following attributes −

Getting current time

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

#!/usr/bin/python  
import time; 
localtime = time.localtime(time.time())  
print  "Local current time :", localtime

This would produce the following result, which could be formatted in any other presentable form −

Local current time : time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=7, 
tm_mday=17, tm_hour=21, tm_min=26, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=198, tm_isdst=0)

Getting formatted time

You can format any time as per your requirement, but simple method to get time in readable format is asctime() −

#!/usr/bin/python  
import time; 
localtime = time.asctime( time.localtime(time.time())  )  
print  "Local current time :", localtime

This would produce the following result −

Local current time : Tue Jan 13 10:17:09 2009

Getting calendar for a month

The calendar module gives a wide range of methods to play with yearly and monthly calendars. Here, we print a calendar for a given month ( Jan 2008 ) −

#!/usr/bin/python  import calendar
cal = calendar.month(2008,  1)  
print  "Here is the calendar:"  
print cal

This would produce the following result −

Here is the calendar:
   January 2008
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

The time Module

There is a popular time module available in Python which provides functions for working with times and for converting between representations. Here is the list of all available methods −

Let us go through the functions briefly −

There are following two important attributes available with time module −

The calendar Module

The calendar module supplies calendar-related functions, including functions to print 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 one. To change this, call calendar.setfirstweekday() function.

Here is a list of functions available with the _calendar_ module −

Other Modules & Functions

If you are interested, then here you would find a list of other important modules and functions to play with date & time in Python −

• The datetime Module

• The pytz Module

• The dateutil Module

Source : .

Source : .