Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Python 101: Interactively learn how to program with Python 3

The datetime Module

Explore how to work with Python's datetime module classes including date, datetime, and timedelta. Learn to create and manipulate date and time objects, format them for readability, and calculate intervals between dates to handle real-world time data efficiently.

We'll cover the following...

We will be learning about the following classes from the datetime module:

  • datetime.date
  • datetime.timedelta
  • datetime.datetime

These will cover the majority of instances where you’ll need to use date and datetime object in Python. There is also a tzinfo class for working with time zones that we won’t be covering. Feel free to take a look at the Python documentation for more information on that class.

datetime.date

Python can represent dates several different ways. We’re going to look at the datetime.date format first as it happens to be one of the simpler date objects.

Python
import datetime
datetime.date(2012, 13, 14)
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#  File "/usercode/__ed_file.py", line 3, in <module>
#    datetime.date(2012, 13, 14)
# ValueError: month must be in 1..12
Python
import datetime
print(datetime.date(2012, 12, 14))
# 2012-12-14

This code shows how to create a simple date object. The date class accepts three arguments: the year, the month and the day. ...