There are a number of ways we can take to get the current date. We will use the date class of the datetime module to accomplish this task.
Example 1: Python get today’s date
from datetime import date today = date.today() print("Today's date:", today)
Here, we imported the date class from the datetime module. Then, we used the date.today() method to get the current local date.
Example 2: Current date in different formats
from datetime import date today = date.today() # dd/mm/YY d1 = today.strftime("%d/%m/%Y") print("d1 =", d1) # Textual month, day and year d2 = today.strftime("%B %d, %Y") print("d2 =", d2) # mm/dd/y d3 = today.strftime("%m/%d/%y") print("d3 =", d3) # Month abbreviation, day and year d4 = today.strftime("%b-%d-%Y") print("d4 current-date-time">Get the current date and time in Python
If we need to get the current date and time, you can use the datetime class of the datetime module.
from datetime import datetime # datetime object containing current date and time now = datetime.now() print("now =", now) # dd/mm/YY H:M:S dt_string = now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S") print("date and time block-inject-1" >
Output
now = 2022-12-27 10:09:20.430322 date and time = 27/12/2022 10:09:20
Here, we have used datetime.now() to get the current date and time.
Then, we used strftime() to create a string representing date and time in another format.
The pytz object has a timezone attribute that takes information/parameter(s) of the specific time-zone you're looking for: pytz.timezone('Africa/Lagos') .
With the all_timezones attribute, you can get a list of all the possible time-zones in the pytz library that can be passed in as parameters to the timezone attribute - just like we did in the last example. That is:
from datetime import datetime import pytz all_timezones = pytz.all_timezones print(all_timezones) # [List of all timezones. ]
Summary
In this article, we talked about getting today's date and time using the datetime.now() function in Python.
We saw some examples that showed how to use the datetime.now() function and its attributes.
Lastly, we saw how to get the date and time in specific locations around the world using the datetime.now() function and the pytz module.
Python is the most popular and versatile programming language in today's world. It is used for web development, data analysis and to perform scientific computation at ease. One of the most common tasks while working with python is to get the current date and time. However, in this short article, we will only try to get the date without the time in python.
Get the current date-time in Python
Usually, when we want today's date we use the datetime in-built python library like this:
As you can see, the datetime library gives us the non-formatted current date along with the time.
So how can we get only today's date and not the time in python?
Well, it's very easy to get using the same datetime and the time library in python.
Get only today's date without the time in python
So to get only the current date without the time we can write the following code:
from datetime import date today_date = date.today() print(today_date)
As you can see, the output of the above code is only today's date i.e 2023-02-07 without the time. Here, we have imported only the date function from the datetime library.
The default format will be yyyy/mm/dd. However, we can easily change it to the dd/mm/yyyy format using the strftime() method.
The strftime() function returns string representation of date and time object in python.
So to format the time, we can use the strftime() function like this in the code:
from datetime import date today_date = date.today().strftime("%d-%m-%Y") print(today_date) # 07-02-2023
So this will give us the output in dd/mm/yyyy date format i.e 07-02-2023
Get today's date using in-built time module
We can use another in-built module in python to get today's date without the time. This library is the python time library.
So using the time module, we can get the current date like this:
import time today_date = time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y") print(today_date)
Here, we have imported time module and used the strftime() function to get the current date in a properly formatted order.
In python, getting today's date is very easy by using the in-built datetime or the time library. By following the process shown above, you can easily get the current date without the time component.