Introduction

Date and time are two of the most useful yet confusing things in programming life. Date time storage and retrieval required a common well-decided protocol. Timezone conversion is also one of the most challenging tasks. That's why while working with Date and Time, developers should be extra curious. When it comes to working with date and time, Python's datetime library is the most reliable one. The Datetime library tries to solve all the problems to a large extent. So that's why developers love to use it.

While creating a user-oriented application, one of the most common tasks is to create a well-formatted Date-time string. Example: Friday, 7 October 2022.

Another useful task is to convert the Date-time string into a datetime object so that we can use that object with the rest of the program.

Datetime object

Python's Datetime Object is an object which stores information on a particular date and time. It stores day, month, year, hour, minute, second, and timezone information as parameters. The object has various methods to do almost everything possible.

The scope of this blog is the formatting of the date-time object, but not the description of the object itself. So if you want to know more, I am adding some references.

• docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html
• geeksforgeeks.org/python-datetime-module

Conversion of user-given String to Python's Datetime Object

Often time, when users give a date or time input, they often use the specified format by the app. Some common formats are DD/MM/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY, and HH:MM:SS, like so. Now, it's the responsibility of the developer to convert the given string to a more useful object.

To convert user given string to a datetime object we use strptime.

strptime

from datetime import datetime

datetime.strptime(date_string, format_string) -> Datetime

Here, date_string is the input from the user, and format_string is the expected format, in which the user has given the date_string. The format_string has the format specifiers, which will be used to extract the values from the date_string.

Example:

from datetime import datetime

datetime.strptime("07/10/2022", "%d/%m/%Y")
# datetime.datetime(2022, 10, 7, 0, 0)

Explaination

The date_string (07/10/2022) is mapped with the format string (%d/%m/%Y).

See the Format list below.

Conversion Datetime Object to user-readable string

Now that, you have a new datetime object and you have done some operations with that, you need to properly format it to string so that users can understand it very well. So now our task is to convert the object to a string.

To convert a datetime object to a string, we use strftime.

strftime

# Method 1
datetime_object.strftime(format_string) -> formatted_string

# Method 2
from datetime import datetime
datetime.strftime(Datetime, format_string) -> formatted_string

• In Method 1, we use strftime as a method call to the datetime object and pass the format_string as a parameter.

• In Method 2, we are directly calling the strftime as a function and passing the datetime object as the first param, and format_string as the second param.

For both cases, it'll return a formatted date and time string.

Example:

from datetime import datetime

datetime.now().strftime("%d/%m/%Y")
# '07/10/2022' (current date in the above format)

Format Specifiers List

Below there are all format specifiers used while formatting. The format specifies are grouped by their types.

Weekday

Day

Month

Year

Hour

Minutes

Seconds

Time Zone

Overall Representation