Python Notes and Examples

Date and Time

Dates and Times

First, a quick review of time and clocks wrt GNU/Linux:

  • Epoch time is the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Aka “timestamp” or “unix time”.
  • DST (daylight savings time) adjustments are only made to local time, not to UTC. So, your local time may be a differing number of hours off from UTC depending upon what time of year it is (that is, whether or not DST is in effect).
  • The hwclock (BIOS), aka RTC (real time clock) is separate from the system (OS) clock. Regular GNU/Linux machines have their hardware clock set to UTC.
  • When you boot up, your OS system clock gets its time from the hwclock, and your OS knows your timezone and whether or not DST is in effect.
  • You need root access to run the hwclock command. Note that by default hwclock shows h/w clock time in local time, even though it’s set to UTC.

To see more details of what your h/w and system clocks are set to:

The upshot of all this is: store your times in epoch time. You can always convert them later to a local time for displaying them.

Python Dates and Times

The time module

Python uses a handful of different time formats, including:

  • seconds since epoch (a float)
  • “time-tuple” (tuple of 9 integers)
  • human-readable date/time string

A time-tuple has fields:

  • tm_year (integer year)
  • tm_mon (1–12)
  • tm_mday (1–31)
  • tm_hour (0–23)
  • tm_min (0–59)
  • tm_sec (0–61, to cover leap-seconds)
  • tm_wday (0–6, Mon == 0)
  • tm_yday (1–366)
  • tm_isdst (-1 == library determines dst, 0 == no, 1 == yes)

Recall that DST is on (== 1) after you spring ahead and until you fall back.

To convert between Python’s basic time formats, see these functions in the time module:

Ex:

Sleep

The datetime module

The main classes in the datetime module are: date, time, datetime, timedelta, and timezone. Times and datetimes can be naive (of tz info) or aware. Dates are always naive.

See the docs for datetime.