How do you create a custom date in python?

Python Datetime

A date in Python is not a data type of its own, but we can import a module named datetime to work with dates as date objects.

Example

Import the datetime module and display the current date:

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime.now()
print(x)

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Date Output

When we execute the code from the example above the result will be:

The date contains year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond.

The datetime module has many methods to return information about the date object.

Here are a few examples, you will learn more about them later in this chapter:

Example

Return the year and name of weekday:

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime.now()

print(x.year)
print(x.strftime("%A"))

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Creating Date Objects

To create a date, we can use the datetime() class (constructor) of the datetime module.

The datetime() class requires three parameters to create a date: year, month, day.

Example

Create a date object:

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 17)

print(x)

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The datetime() class also takes parameters for time and timezone (hour, minute, second, microsecond, tzone), but they are optional, and has a default value of 0, (None for timezone).

The strftime() Method

The datetime object has a method for formatting date objects into readable strings.

The method is called strftime(), and takes one parameter, format, to specify the format of the returned string:

Example

Display the name of the month:

import datetime

x = datetime.datetime(2018, 6, 1)

print(x.strftime("%B"))

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A reference of all the legal format codes:

In this article, we show how to create a date object in Python.

In Python, there is a datetime module which can create dates and times.

In this article, we will show how to create a date object, specifically, not a time object.

We can create any date using the datetime.date() function.

Let's have a date, June 15,1987.

In the following code below, we show how to create a date object on the date, June 15,1987.

So let's now go over this code.

So the first thing we have to do is import the datetime module. The datetime module allows us to create date objects in Python.

We then create a variable, mybirthday. We set this equal to, datetime.date(1987, 6,15)

In order to create a date object with the datetime module, we pass into the datetime.date() function 3 parameters. The first 3 parameters are datetime.date(year,month,day).

We then call the mybirthday variable and this returns, date.date(1987,6,15)

We then call the type() function on the mybirthday variable. When we do this, this returns the output,

Then, if we want, we can get the year, month, or day of the date using the year, month, and day attributes.

So datetime objects are important in Python because we can extract and break down dates easiers. We can get the year. We can get the month. We can get the day. With regular strings, we could extract these things, but it would be a lot more difficult than if we simply used a date object, as we can with the datetime module in Python.

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