PYTHON DATE & TIME

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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, 1970epoch.
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, 1970epoch.

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
Index

Field

Values

4-digit year

2008

Month

1 to 12

Day

1 to 31

Hour

0 to 23

Minute

0 to 59

Second

0 to 61 60or61areleap seconds

Day of Week

0 to 6 0isMonday

Day of year

1 to 366 Julianday

Daylight savings

-1, 0, 1, -1 means library determines DST

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

Attributes

Values

tm_year

2008

tm_mon

1 to 12

tm_mday

1 to 31

tm_hour

0 to 23

tm_min

0 to 59

tm_sec

0 to 61 60or61areleap seconds

tm_wday

0 to 6 0isMonday

tm_yday

1 to 366 Julianday

tm_isdst

-1, 0, 1, -1 means library determines DST

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 Jan2008
#!/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
SN
1

Function with Description

time.altzone
The offset of the local DST timezone, in seconds west of UTC, if one is defined. This is
negative if the local DST timezone is east of UTC asinWesternEurope, includingtheUK. Only use
this if daylight is nonzero.

time.asctime[tupletime]
Accepts a time-tuple and returns a readable 24-character string such as 'Tue Dec 11
18:07:14 2008'.

time.clock
Returns the current CPU time as a floating-point number of seconds. To measure
computational costs of different approaches, the value of time.clock is more useful than
that of time.time.

time.ctime[secs]
Like asctimelocaltime(secs) and without arguments is like asctime

time.gmtime[secs]
Accepts an instant expressed in seconds since the epoch and returns a time-tuple t with
the UTC time. Note : t.tm_isdst is always 0

time.localtime[secs]
Accepts an instant expressed in seconds since the epoch and returns a time-tuple t with
the local time t. tmisdstis0or1, dependingonwhetherDSTappliestoinstantsecsbylocalrules.

time.mktimetupletime
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.

time.sleepsecs
Suspends the calling thread for secs seconds.

time.strftimefmt[, 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.strptimestr, fmt =
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. The environment variable TZ
specifies how this is done.

Let us go through the functions briefly

There are following two important attributes available with time module:
SN

Attribute with Description

time.timezone
Attribute time.timezone is the offset in seconds of the local time zone withoutDST from UTC
> 0intheAmericas; <= 0inmostofEurope, Asia, Africa.

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

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:
SN

Function with Description

calendar.calendaryear, 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 length
21*w+18+2*c. l is the number of lines for each week.
2

calendar.firstweekday
Returns the current setting for the weekday that starts each week. By default, when
calendar is first imported, this is 0, meaning Monday.

calendar.isleapyear
Returns True if year is a leap year; otherwise, False.

calendar.leapdaysy1, y2
Returns the total number of leap days in the years within rangey1, y2.

calendar.monthyear, 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 length
7*w+6. l is the number of lines for each week.

calendar.monthcalendaryear, 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.

calendar.monthrangeyear, month
Returns two integers. The 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.

calendar.prcalyear, w = 2, l = 1, c = 6
Like print calendar.calendaryear, w, l, c.

calendar.prmonthyear, month, w = 2, l = 1
Like print calendar.monthyear, month, w, l.

10

calendar.setfirstweekdayweekday
Sets the first day of each week to weekday code weekday. Weekday codes are 0 Monday to
6 Sunday.

11

calendar.timegmtupletime
The inverse of time.gmtime: accepts a time instant in time-tuple form and returns the
same instant as a floating-point number of seconds since the epoch.

12

calendar.weekdayyear, month, day

Returns the weekday code for the given 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:
The datetime Module
The pytz Module
The dateutil Module

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