PYTHON DATE & TIME

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A Python prog ram can handle date & 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?
T ime intervals are floating -point numbers in units of seconds. Particular instants in time are expressed in
seconds since 12:00am, January 1, 1970(epoch).

T here is a popular time module available in Python which provides functions for working with times, and for
converting between representations. T he 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

T his 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:

Index Field Values

0 4-dig it 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 Daylig ht saving s -1, 0, 1, -1 means library determines DST

T he above tuple is equivalent to struc t_time structure. T his structure has 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 -:

T o 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

T his 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 g et time in readable format is asctime():

#!/usr/bin/python
import time;

localtime = time.asctime( time.localtime(time.time()) )

print "Local current time :", localtime

T his would produce the following result:

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

Getting calendar for a month -:

T he calendar module g ives a wide rang e of methods to play with yearly and monthly calendars. Here, we print a
calendar for a g iven month ( Jan 2008 ):

#!/usr/bin/python
import calendar

cal = calendar.month(2008, 1)
print "Here is the calendar:"
print cal;

T his 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:

T here 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:

SN Func tion with Desc ription

1 time.altzone
T he offset of the local DST timezone, in seconds west of UT C, if one is defined. T his is neg ative if the
local DST timezone is east of UT C (as in Western Europe, including the UK). Only use this if daylig ht is
nonzero.

2 time.asctime([tupletime])
Accepts a time-tuple and returns a readable 24-character string such as 'T ue Dec 11 18:07:14 2008'.

3 time.clock( )
Returns the current CPU time as a floating -point number of seconds. T o 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 arg uments is like asctime( )

5 time.g mtime([secs])
Accepts an instant expressed in seconds since the epoch and returns a time-tuple t with the UT C 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. T he environment variable T Z specifies
how this is done.

T here are following two important attributes available with time module:
 SN Attribute with Desc ription

1 time.timezone
Attribute time.timezone is the offset in seconds of the local time zone (without DST ) from UT C (>0 in
the Americas; <=0 in most of Europe, Asia, Africa).

2 time.tzname
Attribute time.tzname is a pair of locale-dependent string s, which are the names of the local time zone
without and with DST , respectively.

The calendar Module

T he calendar module supplies calendar-related functions, including functions to print a text calendar for a g iven
month or year.

By default, calendar takes Monday as the first day of the week and Sunday as the last one. T o chang e this, call
calendar.setfirstweekday() function.

Here is a list of functions available with the calendar module:

SN Func tion with Desc ription

1 c alendar.c alendar(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 leng th 21*w+18+2*c. l is the number of
lines for each week.

2 c alendar.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 c alendar.isleap(year)
Returns T rue if year is a leap year; otherwise, False.

4 c alendar.leapdays(y1,y2)
Returns the total number of leap days in the years within rang e(y1,y2).

5 c alendar.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 leng th 7*w+6. l is the number of
lines for each week.

6 c alendar.monthc alendar(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 c alendar.monthrang e(year,month)
Returns two integ ers. T he 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 c alendar.prc al(year,w=2,l=1,c =6)

Like print calendar.calendar(year,w,l,c).

9 c alendar.prmonth(year,month,w=2,l=1)
Like print calendar.month(year,month,w,l).

10 c alendar.setfirstweekday(weekday)
Sets the first day of each week to weekday code weekday. Weekday codes are 0 (Monday) to 6
(Sunday).

11 c alendar.timeg m(tupletime)
 T he inverse of time.g mtime: accepts a time instant in time-tuple form and returns the same instant as a
floating -point number of seconds since the epoch.

12 c alendar.weekday(year,month,day)
Returns the weekday code for the g iven date. Weekday codes are 0 (Monday) to 6 (Sunday); month
numbers are 1 (January) to 12 (December).

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:

T he datetime Module

T he pytz Module

T he dateutil Module