Python Tutorial: Datetime Module - How to work with Dates, Times, Timedeltas, and Timezones

In this Python Tutorial, we will be learning how to use the datetime module. The datetime module is important to understand, because you will be working with dates and times in just about every application you write. We will look at how to work with dates, times, datetimes, timedeltas, and timezones. Let's get started.
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#Python

[@asadmoosvi]

In 'strftime,' the 'f' is for 'format,' and in 'strptime,' the 'p' is for 'parse.' Knowing this helps you remember them better. Great video by the way.

[@PoeLemic]

Brilliant. You should have an Einstein award. Thanks for helping me remember it. I'll never forget how to understand now.

[@mattiass4893]

Legend

[@Soulfulreader786]

Do u know how to sort date as earliest and latest .also how to convert to quarter and month

[@aarongrant1184]

and the 'str' is for 'string'

[@АлексейСоков-ь8и]

Ha, i used to think 'f' stands for 'from' (like 'get string from time') but still couldn't come up with what 'p' stands for 😅

[@scene2much]

THIS! is the tutorial I've been looking for... makes timezone usage clear, and removes lots of confusion and uncertainty. Thumbs Up!

[@roccodivincenzo1858]

Pride of you Corey! You're one of the few ones who do no sell shitty online courses but only share your knowledge with us

[@aaryareddy9275]

never commented on any video but trust me you are best at what you are doing. Great work. you make the topics crystal clear.

[@kumaranda4720]

Happy Birthday, Corey, Just now I have seen and found your DOB (9/24) when you explain about DateTime. It is a coincidence.

[@mylearnings7319]

I'm not getting the conversion error at 21:15 (when trying to convert naïve datetime to us time zone), I assume some improvisation in datetime module did happened in recent years, your views on this? @Corey Schafer

[@nashsok]

Had the same question as you! In the Python documentation: docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html "Changed in version 3.6: The astimezone() method can now be called on naive instances that are presumed to represent system local time."

[@vaibhavkrkm]

I wonder why someone would have disliked this video 😳 Anyways, love your amazing tutorials, pls keep it up 🤗👍

[@wishaalrk]

Thank you very much for the explanation. This is the best video about datetime I've seen so far, keep it up!

[@Colstonewall]

Awesome tutorial, Corey. Datetimes is something I've never been good at, for lack of studying. But, rarely does anyone do a thorough tutorial on in, and that's where you've done a great job! Thanx

[@Spec970]

This might not mean much to you, but honestly, I'd like to thank you for taking time out of your probably cluttered schedule to help out new programmers like my self every day. Please keep doing what your doing, and know that yes, you ARE in fact impacting many, many peoples lives. I hope to see more OOP content soon as well as some more helpful programming terms! :)

[@coreyms]

That means more than you know. Thanks a lot... I really do appreciate it.

[@Spec970]

Corey Schafer Glad to hear that! I'd love to see some more OOP videos as well as a video on threads from you.

[@coreyms]

I'll be recording more OOP videos this weekend and hopefully will release some next week. I've been meaning to put together a video on threads and multiprocessing, but there are a few other videos I have in my queue before that. I will try to get around to those as soon as possible though! Thanks.

[@PoeLemic]

Yes, I even teach other programmers (in past), and Teacher here is really giving me so much knowledge quickly.

[@daveofyorkshire301]

How are you setting 100,000 milliseconds when 1000 is 1 second? You are effectively adding 100 seconds or 1 minute 40 seconds, and that's NOT happening. It seems to be just a decimal value NOT milliseconds. A timezone would usually be read from a config file or environment variable, the use of an enumerated constant would be pointless as its fixed in code, and therefore not configurable.

[@BinayKumarSharma]

nice

[@GHOST_PBG]

Nice tutorial, I was just wondering how you managed to delete all the unnecessary information from the output window? Because I have too much information showing up in the result section of VS code and sometimes it's hard to find the actual code result and it's annoying! Can you tell how you deleted that part?

[@dineshds5124]

Amazing explanation 🔥 I really impressed by your teaching method 🔥✌️

[@OttoFazzl]

This is another amazing video! I am so glad you are making these videos to let people learn about Python!

[@MrDreadEnd]

It was an accident but in the comments you indicate datetimes can be added to one another to produce a timedelta. However datetimes can only be subtracted from one another to create a delta. See 6:00 lines 9 and 10

[@SujeetRaj711]

Hi Corey, Even 3.5 years later. I found this to be the best explanation after searching around for 2 hrs.... Thank You :) Can you please make the video on Arrow though :)

[@ahmed55555]

Hey Corey, what IDE are you using? I'm interested in using it, as I like how it shows how long it took to finish the program at the bottom.

[@segamanable91]

that's Sublime Text

[@thecodinghustle1006]

sublime text with a terminal package

[@df6148]

Thank you so much. Within the first 5 mins I was able to gather a lot of useful information that I can already apply to my code. THANK YOU

[@ronmann5810]

Man your the best. please keep the videos coming! For some reason I learn well from you, more so than anyone else on youtube.

[@prodweatherman]

fire

[@fancyaristocrat7450]

Thanks mate, this was of really great help.

[@nickt423]

Hey Corey, I'm trying to understand datetime.datetime.now() in terms of OOP. Would that be the same as saying moduleName.className.methodName?

[@paras221]

Happy belated bday Corey! bday = datetime.date(2019,9,24)

[@data_monk]

Now it seems astimezone can be applied over naive dt object

[@TheMheadCondition]

Love the explanation. Simple and easy to follow. I was confused about datetime until i saw ur video. Just wanted to say thanks

[@vandrujemesk8651]

Ďakujem veľmi pekne za video. Super vysvetlené. Thank you very much for the video. Super explained.

[@fordsrmaster]

Even though this is an older video, I found it to be a great help in learning the datetime library. Thanks for the video.

[@АлександрЖарков-у9ш]

great video, this helped me a lot, thanks, keep doing a videos like this, you are best )

[@theslaphappychap]

Wow, this is one hell of a helpful video. Corey, thank you so much for this. So incredibly helpful and concise. You rock!

[@luqmanhakim7781]

hey Corey ! I just wanted to tell you that I immediately pause watching this video at minute 6:30 because you said your birthday is on 24 September which is the same with me. I'm just happy to have a same birthday date with an amazing person like you :) keep up the good content. I'm younger btw hehe

[@mumenyanyamu2524]

Hi Corey. This video is so good Keep up the good work

[@leobogouslavski5237]

Hi Corey and thank you for another great tutorial. I wish you mentioned daylight savings as well, I am sure many developers would have found it useful :)

[@henrywoo1668]

Extremely helpful video !

[@kaliberry6159]

Love your python tutorials. By far the best videos on the youtube IMO. Please keep the python videos coming. Your OOP tutorials has helped me understand classes very clearly. Thank you!

[@greg-ZE]

Great video! Question: Does pandas.DataFrame.tz_localize work the same or as well as pytz's functions? At first it seemed more basic than pytz, but I see examples on stackoverflow where they use this function and 'US/Eastern' in order to localize a timestamp index in a dataframe (which is what I'm trying to do!). It seems it would be a little easier to use pandas functionality without importing pytz, but wanted to get some pros/cons from anybody here. Thanks!

[@evansscott1]

I keep getting an error message when I try to import the pytz module in PyCharm.

[@easydatascience2508]

try to see my playlist. Full python crash course tutorials. with all the source files.

[@larbisahli2273]

try: t = int(input('How many hours it took you to finish this video: ')) except: print('You are an idiot') if t >= 1: h = 'hours' elif t == 1: h = 'hour' else: print('Go home!') if t != 0 : print('it took me ' + str(t) + h ' to finish the video ')

[@CWShuva]

import datetime as dt import pytz time_st ="13:00" from_zone = pytz.timezone("Etc/GMT") to_zone = pytz.timezone('Asia/Kolkata') time_utc = dt.datetime.strptime(time_st, '%H:%M') local_utc = from_zone.localize(time_utc,is_dst=True) new_time = local_utc.astimezone(to_zone) print(time_utc.strftime("%H:%M")) print(new_time.strftime("%H:%M")) Output:- 13:00 18:53 Expected output:- 13:00 18:30 please can anyone tell me what is the problem

[@venkatv4993]

hey my birthday is also on same day Sep 24

[@MA-UTUBE-99]

Excellent videos. I am new to python. Used to do engineering/ scientific programming many many (*n! ) years ago. Used Fortran at that time. I am really enjoying learning Python with such clear videos and a user friendly language. May you "Live long and prosper " !!!!!

[@loidtayag4440]

Whats the differnece between these two? They output the same thing?Is the 2nd more efficient or something? dt_UTC = datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.UTC) dt_Wherever = dt_UTC.astimezone(pytz.timezone('Asia/Manila')) print(dt_Wherever) DT_Wherever = datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.timezone('Asia/Manila')) print(DT_Wherever)

[@maxhansen5166]

thanks. again a great video......

[@TestTest-yx5yv]

Hi, newbie here. im trying to automate and saving my excel file. I declared tday as date today & tdelta to 1. then i created a tdate=tday-tdelta which just minus 1 day from today. Then i declared FILE_NAME as the path with the filename itself with the date. so if today is April 7, 2021 the filename should look like DATA_2021-04-06.csv. The problem is when i try saving it. and executing the pyautogui.typewrite(FILE_NAME). it just types in everything in text. This is the filename created "DATA_ + tdate +.csv . It looks as if tdate isn't seen as a variable. Rather it is seen as a text. I placed + + in between the variable tdate. but still its being saved as a text. Please anyone help me. Thank you #CREATING DATE -1 tday=datetime.date.today() tdelta=datetime.timedelta(days=1) tdate=tday-tdelta #SAVING pyautogui.hotkey('Ctrl', 's') pyautogui.hotkey('enter') pyautogui.press('right') pyautogui.press('down', presses=5) pyautogui.hotkey('enter') pyautogui.click(202, 503) FILE_NAME = 'C:\Users\Desktop\New folder(3)\DATA_' + tdate + '.csv' pyautogui.typewrite(FILE_NAME)

[@icixai1850]

Great tutorial, many thanks !! Though I have a question, I have a coma separated list with 1 million dates in this format : "16-04-2021 00:00, xxx, fff, ..." I need to convert "16-04-2021 00:00," into 2 fields date and time "16-04-2021, 00:00," ... struggling, can you help ?

[@ST-wx6vw]

Possible Error: Line# 10 at time 07:00. Line #10 says: timedelta = date1 + date2. Actually, subtraction of dates results in timedelta but addtion gives error. For example: >>> print(f'x is {x} and y is {y}') x is 2020-01-07 and y is 2020-01-21 >>> print(f'x-y is {x-y} and y is {type(x-y)}') x-y is -14 days, 0:00:00 and y is >>> print(x+y) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'datetime.date' and 'datetime.date' >>>

[@swetaravi5362]

When trying to use UDF in pySpark: from pyspark.sql.functions import udf date_udf = fn.udf( lambda x: datetime.strptime(x,'%b %d, %Y'), DateType() ) df = df.withColumn("Order Date new", date_udf(col("dates"))) I am unable to show the data frame value. It gives Java Runtime error. Can someone pls help?

[@geekychandraul]

Hi Corey again. I was working with dataetime module. I have a specific problem where i have to run a python program at specific time like exactly at 12:00 and then at 12:01,12:02 like wise. can you help me how can i achieve this. also when i am running {code} dt = datetime.datetime(2019, 9, 26, 22, 7, 00) while True: print(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")) print(dt) if dt == datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"): print('pass') {code} the if condition never meets. can you please help me why is that.

[@mon0theist_tv]

What is the "Finished in 0.0 seconds" message in your terminal? Is that a feature of Sublime Text? (looks like you're using Sublime Text but I'm not sure)

[@nackyding]

I'm having trouble parsing string UTC datetime e.g. ("2021-01-04 08:00:00+00:00") to datetime object. How do I format datetime string to work with either pandas.to_datetime() or datetime.strftime()?

[@yup9889]

I have a data set with date time series. I was able to to create 10H intervals with the data set but I also want to set a particular date range and plot it but I keep receiving an error. date and time are set to index. dfmin[dfmin["TimeString"].between('2022-03-09','2022-03-19')] Keyerror'TimeString' why would I get this error? I cant seem to find any similar cases on stackover flow. Thank you.

[@carolinewu9657]

THANK YOU!!! Your tutorial is super helpful!!! You're amazing at explaining this stuff!

[@manuelch4589]

Great! This is an excellent video for me. It helped me understand the intricacies of working with datetime and timezones. Much appreciated.

[@muditkaura6-c94]

Thank you very much.

[@medhapundir6853]

hi I am not getting timezone error ,when I convert from now to east time zone: dt_new=datetime.datetime.now() print(dt_new) dt_east=dt_new.astimezone(pytz.timezone('US/Eastern')) print(dt_east)

[@kkevinluke]

Thank you. My goto channel for py modules.

[@SanjeetChand]

thank you for this :)

[@kevinwright7931]

You put the date format as %B %d, %Y. %B = Month's full name %d = Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number %Y = Year with century as a decimal number It didn't print that format.

[@RajathShetty17]

Hey Corey! Could you please make a video on the Arrow module as you've mentioned in this video. Looking forward to it. Thanks

[@hetalchavan9446]

you left no stone unturned

[@meiamavice]

Better than skillshare

[@sandgaara183]

Thanks, man, you reeeally helped me. Only after watching your video I was able to understand the datetime object properly.

[@brendan3966]

This is great. The datetime module is surprisingly confusing.

[@YoMaMenWhatsSnake]

I want to make a stopwatch. Let's say that i have 5 runners and only one track. They start running with 10 seconds from each other, because i only have one track. How do i know the lap time of the third athlete? They ran 8 laps of 400 meters. How do i know each lap time of each one? I hope you could help!

[@e-maxwell]

How could I get the timezone offset from my local timezone and UTC? In JS it's getTimezoneOffset()

[@sunilkumargupta7980]

I need Difference between 2 time and its coming in "day HH:MM:SS" Format but I need Only in "HH:MM: SS" format only. Like "1 day 15:30:00" = "39:30:00".

[@CodingMazaa]

I have two questions, one of them being a request to you. One: how to create an infinite loop through datetime module to create a live streaming data(based on stock market data feeds)? Two(this is my earnest request):Will it be possible for you to create video tutorial on the pyalgotrade library(gbeced.github.io/pyalgotrade/)? I am a finance student, and learning python, so any tutorial on using Python for technical analysis of financial markets is a great help

[@shubhamsaurbhsharma5163]

You made this on 26th July 2016 and I am watching it on same date with different year :)

[@АлексейСоков-ь8и]

2022

[@jmy976]

Hi Corey. Thank you for the informative video. However, i have some questions. How do I get the program to read two integers that represents a month and day? Then i need to print out the season for that particular month and day. Thanks in advance

[@swapnilpatil2445]

Hello sir, I want to take DATE as input from excel. My python script returns date with Timestamp. How do i parse it as i am interested in DATE only not timestamp. Thanks in advance.

[@PrebenOlsen90]

Is there any way to change timezone on a timestamp? E.g. some_time = 18:20 (datetime.datetime.strptime(thetime, '%H:%M').time()) And then add 2 hours to it? Would love help on this!

[@JonathanPereiraBr]

Hi PrebenOlsen90, how are you? So, as you are working just with a time and need to add a static 2 hours, I don't believe that would be necessary to set a timezone, maybe you can add the hours simply using the timedelta feature. Check this example: pastebin.com/XdzXPZ7Z ... I hope that would be useful! =D

[@RSlayer001]

I'm Like #4,500 apparently Great stuff man!

[@nukhbaiqbal7798]

Hey, Is there some way to ask user to enter a line but within a time limit in python I mean for example there is only 10s to write a line by user and if he didn't write within 10s the program says TIME IS OVER.

[@jerrylopez8117]

Good look at datetime , I will use this video as a reference when neeeded.

[@akira_asahi]

Thank you for the video. I am grateful for your time and contribution. Kind regards, Akira.

[@slambodianjones]

Great video, helped on part of my project.

[@DJ-ct6so]

Nice video Corey, very instructive. And you're a Libra, just like me. :)

[@muditkaura6-c94]

Compiler name?

[@alexisdiaz4217]

Great refresher! Thank you!

[@failuregreat9424]

I like to create .py files for each video I watch here, so I created a file called "datetime.py" for this one. But I was having trouble with it, I could import the module, but it said the functions didn't exist. I had to change the name of this file to something different than 'datetime.py', because (I assume) this file was calling itself. If you're having some problems with the module, maybe this can help.

[@coreyms]

Yes, you shouldn't name scripts the same name as something you are using from elsewhere.

[@PhishChiang]

That's exactly what happened to me, thanks for the help!

[@morningstar2728]

Failure Great thanks it's work!

[@samyajitpoddar7104]

whats that ide?

[@heshankumarasinghe3159]

Thank you... This video is helpful.... Gonna watch it again sometime.....

[@Raj-sz9pg]

There is also .totalseconds() function. And there will be more but this video covered useful things for a analysis field of work

[@faridarustamova9470]

Hello Corey. I can't run datetime module on sublime text. I even download it on cmd. On cmd and ilde I can run any datetime code but not on sublime text. How can I solve this problem?

[@Austin9435]

Awesome tutorial! Highly recommended! Perfect speed on the information to really hammer it in. Thank you so much.

[@PoeLemic]

Thank you for showing this. I needed to learn this for my understanding of Python dates. This came at exact right time.

[@prashantpant2876]

A tip to everyone here, don't save your python file with name like 'date', 'datetime', or 'time' This causes your editor unable to execute your codes. I was facing this for more than a week. Finally I got rid of this.

[@slambodianjones]

thank you for sharing

[@harishkolanu]

how can we convert given GMT time (2020-05-28 15:34:10) to IST

[@lastravaganza2385]

you didn't explained a lot of the concepts bro. what is astimezone for? you never mentioned that.

[@nn8244]

what if my date is for example 20180610 how can I work with it?

[@phisherm64vcx67]

Is necessary to learn about this module datetime ? bcz is so hard to memorize that ..Any Help Please

[@brian_cream]

Thank you that was helpful

[@SimonOrlovsky]

Awesome thank you!

[@nandyhaaru9298]

is it possible to parse a string 19th july 2021 using strptime? If so what is the format to use

[@aliwaseem5990]

Helped me alot , thanks you

[@sciproject1]

Hi Corey, Your video lectures are great. It would be helpful if you could suggest some small scale projects which are aligned with your lectures.

[@claylanzino9749]

Very interesting video, it has been a great help for me. Thanks for sharing...

[@marcusfarcus]

Fantastic reference! Thank you!

[@bilalkhan-bb9bo]

hoe to work with datetime and get ctime and mtime on files in a directory and folders and loop through multiple files in a directory , please make a video on that