16. The time module

The time module provide tools for, among other things, getting the current time, manipulating, formatting and reading times and dates. Dates can be represented as either a real number (the seconds since 0 hours, January 1 in the “epoch,” a platform-dependent year; for UNIX, it’s 1970), or a tuple containing nine integers. These integers are explained in the following table.

The tuple (2002, 1, 21, 12, 2, 56, 0, 21, 0) represents January 21, 2002, at 12:02:56, which is a Monday, and the 21st day of the year.

See also

These datetime modules.

16.1. Quick start

ndex Field Value ============ ======================= ===================================== 0 Year For example, 2000, 2001, and so on 1 Month In the range 1­12 2 Day In the range 1­31 3 Hour In the range 0­23 4 Minute In the range 0­59 5 Second In the range 0­61 6 Weekday In the range 0­6, where Monday is 0 7 Julian day In the range 1­366 8 Daylight Savings 0, 1, or ­1 ============ ======================= =====================================

Here are some functions.

Function	Description
asctime([tuple])	Converts time tuple to a string
localtime([secs])	Converts seconds to a date tuple, local time
mktime(tuple)	Converts time tuple to local time
sleep(secs)	Sleeps (does nothing) for secs seconds
strptime(string[, format])	Parses a string into a time tuple
time()	Current time (seconds since the epoch, UTC)

>>> import time
>>> date1 = (2005, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, -1, -1, -1)
>>> time.asctime(date1)
'Sun Jan  1 00:00:00 2005'

Todo

time.accept2dyear time.ctime time.struct_time time.tzset time.altzone time.daylight time.gmtime time.strftime time.timezone time.clock time.tzname