How To Get Current Time In Python?

This is a quick tutorial on how to get the current time in python. The most common and simplest ways to get time in python are discussed here with examples.

Table of Contents

Using the datetime package

Python comes with a pre-installed datetime package. All you need to do is to import this package in your python program and then you can easily use the current time as you wanted. The example code is given below.

from datetime import datetime
time = datetime.now()
print(time)

Output.

The above code simply prints out the full time upto the accuracy of microseconds, as you can see in the screenshot of the output.

You can format the output as the way you like by using this module as illustrated in the following code.

from datetime import datetime
time = datetime.now().strftime('%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S')
print(time)

Using the time package

There another pre-installed time package to get this job done. Under the time module, you have to import the two things, gmtime to get the current time and strftime which will help you to present the current time in the required format.

The strftime function takes two arguments, in the first argument, you’ve to specify the output time format with different symbols for the different units of time. Get the detailed symbol reference here. An example code is illustrated below with output.

from time import gmtime, strftime
time = strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S", gmtime())
print(time)

Output.