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Datetime module

The datetime module is a standard library module that supplies classes for manipulating dates and times. While date and time arithmetic is supported, the focus of the implementation is on efficient attribute extraction for output formatting and manipulation.

The datetime module has three types for storing a point in time:

  • date for year, month, day of month
  • time for hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, time zone info
  • datetime combines date and time. It has the methods date() and time() to get the corresponding date and time objects, and there's a handy combine function to combine date and time into a datetime.

Parsing and formatting date strings

datetime.strptime is the main routine for parsing strings into datetimes. It can handle all sorts of formats, with the format determined by a format string you give it:

from datetime import datetime

datetime_object = datetime.strptime('Jun 1 2005  1:33PM', '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p')

datetime.strftime is the routine to format datetime objects to string. 

import datetime

t = datetime.datetime(2012, 2, 23, 0, 0)
t.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
# output: '02/23/2012'

Format options available in the datetime documentation and at strftime.org.

To summarize: * strptime = "string parse time" * strftime = "string format time"