August 11, 2018
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Get current datetime without milliseconds in Python

By  Code Snippets  3 Comments

Introduction

In Python, the datetime module can be used to get date and time. This is good but there is something annoying: the milliseconds or the fraction that gets printed by default. How can we get rid of that ? There are a couple of ways to do the trick.

Let us see…

Example code

The following code snippet shows the default behavior…

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# Import datetime module
import datetime
 
# Get current date and time
dt = datetime.datetime.now()
 
# This is going to print someting like:
# 2018-08-11 16:23:45.524765
print(dt)

We can change the default behavior by formatting the date time string as follows…

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# Import datetime module
import datetime
 
# Get current date and time
dt = datetime.datetime.now()
 
# Format datetime string
x = dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
 
# This is going to print something like:
# 2018-08-11 16:25:05
print(x)

The replace function can do the job as well…

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# Import datetime module
import datetime
 
# Get current date and time
dt = datetime.datetime.now()
 
# This is going to remove the milliseconds
x = dt.replace(microsecond=0)
print(x)

Splitting the string using the dot as a delimiter works perfectly…

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# Import datetime module
import datetime
 
# Get current date and time
dt = datetime.datetime.now()
 
# Using the split built in function
x = str(dt).split('.')[0]
print(x)

And finally something fancy like regular expressions…

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# Import datetime module
import datetime
# Regular expressions
import re
 
# Get current date and time
dt = datetime.datetime.now()
 
# Match datetime string then dot then milliseconds
mat = re.match(r'(.+)\.(.+)', str(dt), re.M|re.I)
 
# First group is the datetime string without
# milliseconds
print(mat.group(1))

That was it for today. I hope it was useful. Thanks for visiting.

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Mohammed Abualrob

Software Engineer @ Cisco

3 Comments
  1. sarah tan

    import datetime
    def time():
    dt = datetime.datetime.now()
    print str(dt)[0:19]

    >>>2019-11-29 20:52:33

    Reply
  2. Martin

    great post!

    Reply
  3. Amir Fazel

    import datetime as _dt

    ts = _dt.datetime.now().timestamp()
    print(“TimeStamp without microseconds: “, int(ts))

    dt = _dt.datetime.now()
    print(“Date & Time without microseconds: “, str(dt)[0:-7])

    Reply

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