Python is one of the most popular programming languages in today’s world and it is used in different fields including web development, data analytics, and in mathematical computations. And one of the common tasks we do in python is to get the current date and time in python.

Here, in this short guide, we will see different ways to get the current date and time in python.

Get the current date and time in python

In python, we can use its in-built python libraries like datetime module or the time module to work with date and time.

Since it’s in-built, we don’t have to install it in our project, we just need to import it, and it’s good to go.

Using the datetime Module

The datetime module is a very common module that provides classes to manipulate dates and times in python. It also provides functions for formatting and parsing dates and times.

Here, is a simple example to get the current date and time in python.

from datetime import datetime

current_date_time = datetime.now()
print("Current date and time:", current_datetime)

This code will output the current date and time in this format:

Current date and time: 2023-02-08 12:50:30.440684

Get only the current date using datetime module

Now, if you only want the current date and not the time, then we can use the date class provided by the module.

Example:

from datetime import date

current_date = date.today()

formatted_current_date = current_date.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")

print("Current date:", formatted_current_date)

This will only give us the current date as the output:

Current date: 08-02-2023

Here, we have imported the date from datetime module and got the current date, and then used strftime("%d-%m-%Y") function to format the date in dd/mm/yyyy order.

Get only current time using datetime module

If you want to get only current time separately, then we have to use the strftime() function in the code. The strftime() function also helps us to format our time in hh:mm:ss format.

Example:

from datetime import datetime

current_date_time = datetime.now()

current_time = current_date_time.strftime("%H:%M:%S")

print("Current time:", current_time)

The above code will give us a formatted current time:

Current time: 12:58:14

Using the time Module

We can also use the time module to get the current date and time in python. It is used to handle time values and also provide functions for formatting them into strings.

Get only date using time Module

So, to get the current date we can use the following code:

import time

current_date = time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")

print(current_date)

This code will output the current date in dd/mm/yyyy as:

Current date: 08-02-2023

Get only the time using time Module

To get only the current time we can use the following code:

import time

current_time = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("Current time:", current_time)

This will give us the current time as output in hh/mm/ss format:

Current time: 13:31:49

Conclusion:

In this article, we have seen different ways to get the current date and time using the datetime and time modules. These two modules provide everything that is needed to work with time and date in python. You can use any of the methods in your program depending on your needs.

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