In your websites and applications, you might want to add functionalities like timestamps or checking the time of a user’s activity.
Every programming language has modules or methods for working with time, and Python is not an exception.
With the datetime
and time
modules of Python, you can get the current date and time, or the date and time in a particular time zone.
In this article, I will show you how to get the current time in Python with the datetime
and time
modules.
How to Get the Current Time with the Datetime Module
The first thing you can do to quickly get the current date and time is to use the datetime.now()
function from the datetime module:
from datetime import datetime
current_date_and_time = datetime.now()
print("The current date and time is", current_date_and_time)
# The current date and time is 2022-07-12 10:22:00.776664
This shows you not just the time but also the date.
To extract the time, you can use the strftime()
function and pass in ("%H:%M:%S")
- %H gets the hour
- %M gets the minute
- %S gets the seconds
from datetime import datetime
time_now = datetime.now()
current_time = time_now.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("The current date and time is", current_time)
# The current date and time is 10:27:45
You can also re-write the code like this:
from datetime import datetime
time_now = datetime.now().strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("The current date and time is", time_now)
# The current date and time is 10:30:37
How to Get the Current Time with the Time Module
Apart from the datetime()
module, the time
module is another built-in way to get the current time in Python.
As usual, you have to import the time module first, and then you can use the ctime()
method to get the current date and time.
import time
current_time = time.ctime()
print(current_time)
# Tue Jul 12 10:37:46 2022
To extract the current time, you also have to use the strftime()
function:
import time
current_time = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("The current time is", current_time)
# The current time is 10:42:32
Final Thoughts
This article showed you two ways you can get the current time with Python.
If you’re wondering which to use between the time
and datetime
modules, it depends on what you want:
time
is more precise thandatetime
- if you don’t want ambiguity with daylight savings time (DST), use
time
datetime
has more built-in objects you can work with but has limited support for time zones.
If you want to work with time zones, you should consider using the pytz
module.
To learn how you can get the time in a particular zone, I wrote about the pytz
module here.
Keep coding :)