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Get the current time in Python

Get the current time in Python

David Y.

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The Problem

How do I get the current time in Python?

The Solution

We can get the current time using the now method in Python’s built-in datetime library. For example:

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from datetime import datetime

current_time = datetime.now()

current_time will contain a datetime object containing the date and time values for the instant at which the function was called. This can be accessed and displayed in a number of different ways:

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print(current_time)        # will print the full date and time
print(current_time.time()) # will print the time of day only
print(current_time.date()) # will print the calendar date only

Note that the datetime object stored in current_time is not aware of time zones. To get the current time for a specific time zone, we must incorporate pytz into our code:

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from datetime import datetime
import pytz

current_time = datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'))

print(current_time)             # will print the full date and time with time zone offset from UTC
print(current_time.time())      # will print the time of day only
print(current_time.date())      # will print the calendar date only
print(current_time.utcoffset()) # will print the offset from UTC time

Alternatively, if we want to work with Unix time rather than datetime objects, we can use Python’s time module. The current Unix time is returned by time.time():

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import time

print(time.time()) # will print the current Unix time as a floating point number
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