Real Python: How to Get and Use the Current Time in Python

Getting the current time in Python is a nice starting point for many time-related operations. One very important use case is creating timestamps. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to get, display, and format the current time with the datetime module.

To effectively use the current time in your Python applications, you’ll add a few tools to your belt. For instance, you’ll learn how to read attributes of the current time, like the year, minutes, or seconds. To make the time more easily readable, you’ll explore options for printing it. You’ll also get to know different formats of time and learn how computers represent time, how to serialize time, and how to deal with time zones.

How to Tell the Time in Python

The most straightforward way to get and print the current time is to use the .now()class method from the datetimeclass in the datetime module:

>>> fromdatetimeimportdatetime>>> now=datetime.now()>>> nowdatetime(2022, 11, 22, 14, 31, 59, 331225)>>> print(now)2022-11-22 14:31:59.331225

The class method .now() is a constructor method that returns a datetime object. When the REPL evaluates the now variable, you get a representation of the datetime object. It can be pretty hard to tell what each number means. But if you explicitly print the now variable, then you get a slightly different output that presents the information in a familiar timestamp format.

You may recognize the format of the printed datetime object. It closely follows an international standard, ISO 8601, for formatting time and dates. You’ll find this format in many places!

There’s a slight deviation from the ISO 8601 standard in the format that Python uses, though. The standard says that the date and the hour parts of the timestamp should be separated by a T character, but the default datetime object passed through the print() function separates them with a single space.

Python, being ever extensible and customizable, enables you to customize the format in which it prints the timestamp. The datetime class internally uses its .isoformat() method when printing. Since .isoformat() is just an instance method, you can call it directly from any datetime object to customize the ISO timestamp:

>>> datetime.now().isoformat()'2022-11-22T14:31:59.331225'>>> datetime.now().isoformat(sep="")'2022-11-22 14:31:59.331225'

You’ll note that when you call .isoformat() without any arguments, the standard ISO 8601 separator T is used. The way that the datetime class has implemented its special instance method .__str__() under the hood, though, is with a single space as the sep argument.

Being able to get the full date and time is great, but sometimes you might be looking for something specific. Maybe you only want the month or day, for example. In those cases, you can choose from a bunch of attributes:

>>> fromdatetimeimportdatetime>>> now=datetime.now()>>> print(f"""... {now.month= }... {now.day= }... {now.hour= }... {now.minute= }... {now.weekday()= }... {now.isoweekday()= }"""... )now.month = 11now.day = 22now.hour = 14now.minute = 31now.weekday() = 1now.isoweekday() = 2

In this snippet, you use a triple-quoted f-string with the = sign within the curly brackets to output the expressions and their results.