Python Dates

A date in Python is not a data type of its own, but we can import a module named datetime to work with dates as date objects.

Import the datetime module and display the current date:

x = datetime.datetime.now()print(x)

When we execute the code from the example above the result will be:

The date contains year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond.

The datetime module has many methods to return information about the date object.

Here are a few examples, you will learn more about them later in this chapter:

Return the year and name of weekday:

x = datetime.datetime.now()

print(x.year) print(x.strftime("%A"))

To create a date, we can use the datetime() class (constructor) of the datetime module.

The datetime() class requires three parameters to create a date: year, month, day.

Create a date object:

x = datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 17)

print(x)

The datetime() class also takes parameters for time and timezone (hour, minute, second, microsecond, tzone), but they are optional, and has a default value of 0, (None for timezone).

The datetime object has a method for formatting date objects into readable strings.

The method is called strftime(), and takes one parameter, format, to specify the format of the returned string:

Display the name of the month:

x = datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 1)

print(x.strftime("%B"))

A reference of all the legal format codes: