Working with dates and times

Many programs will need to deal with dates and times, and Python comes with multiple modules to help you handle those effectively. The most common module is the datetime module. The datetime module comes with three types that can be used to represent dates, times, and timestamps. There are also other modules, such as the time module or the calendar module, which can be used for some other use cases.

datetime.date can be used to represent any date between the years 1 and 9999. For any date/time outside of this range, you would need to use more specialized libraries, such as the astropy library.

You can create a datetime.date object by passing the year, month, and day, or get today by just calling datetime.date.today():

import datetime
datetime.date.today()

The output is as follows:

Figure 6.6 – Representation of a date object

The output format for time is similar; it takes the hour, minute, second, and microsecond...