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In this article, you will learn to get today’s date and current date and time in Python. We will also format the date and time in different formats using strftime() method.
There are a number of ways you can take to get the current date. We will use the date
class of the datetime module to accomplish this task.
1. 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.
By the way, date.today()
returns a date
object, which is assigned to the today variable in the above program. Now, you can use the strftime() method to create a string representing date in different formats.
2. 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 =", d4)
When you run the program, the output will be something like:
d1 = 16/09/2019 d2 = September 16, 2019 d3 = 09/16/19 d4 = Sep-16-2019
If you need to get the current date and time, you can use datetime
class of the datetime
module.
3. Example 3: Get the current date and time
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 =", dt_string)
You will gate output like below.
now = 2021-06-25 07:58:56.550604 date and time = 25/06/2021 07:58:56
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.