Today and Tomorrow

We've seen that datetime can make objects for right now. 0:00 And we can manipulate those with time deltas. 0:03 But, what if we want it to be for today, or to combine dates and times together? 0:06 Let's look at all of the available attributes on the datetime object. 0:11 So just like before, we want to import datetime. 0:14 And, let's make a couple of variables here. 0:18 We're gonna call one now, which would be datetime.datetime.now. 0:22 And let's do another one which is today, which will be datetime.datetime.today. 0:26 So, let's look at these. 0:32 So it's kind of strange. 0:34 They're almost the exact same thing. 0:35 They both have the same date. 0:37 They both have the same hour. 0:39 They both have the same minute. 0:40 The only difference is the seconds, 0:41 because one ran a few seconds after the other one. 0:43 So what's up with this? 0:46 Well, .now and .today both do the same thing. 0:46 The difference is that now can take a timezone as an argument, 0:50 so that you can control where the now is. 0:54 And today doesn't. 0:59 But we're not quite ready for time zones yet. 1:00 We're gonna talk about those at the end of the course. 1:02 So let's make a today that more accurately reflects what I think of as today, 1:04 which would be today's date with midnight as the time. 1:11 And we're gonna do that by using the combine method in the datetime library, 1:16 or datetime class. 1:20 Sorry. 1:22 So, datetime.datetime.combine, and 1:23 what it lets us do is it lets us combine a date and a time. 1:26 This is probably the only time that you'll really use date. 1:30 Because data and time just aren't all that useful on their own. 1:34 And then daytime.time. 1:39 And so, doing an empty time like this generates one that's at midnight. 1:41 So, it looks like it's a day. 1:45 There's our today. 1:48 So, that's what we want. 1:49 We've got today at midnight. 1:50 All right, that's great. 1:53 What if we just wanna get out some attributes from this? 1:54 So, if we do like today.month. 1:57 You get ten and today.hour you get zero. 2:00 And today.year. 2:05 And these work on now as well. 2:06 We can do now.hour we get different hours. 2:09 We've actually kind of already played with these when we were getting the seconds to 2:12 calculate between the two times. 2:15 That was off of a time delta. 2:16 But these work the same way. 2:19 They expose the same api for something like that, which is very common in python. 2:21 Related classes will work the same way, because they're related. 2:26 And python doesn't want you to be surprised while you're working. 2:30 Okay, so let's try something a little bit more generalized. 2:34 What if I wanna know what day of the week today is? 2:37 Well, I can call the weekday method, and I get back two. 2:41 Now, this is coming from a list and python's weeks start on Monday. 2:46 Monday is zero, so that means Tuesday is one, and number two is Wednesday. 2:50 Okay, last thing to talk about here, 2:56 what if I want the POSIX timestamp for a certain date and time? 2:58 So basically, what we have is January 1st, 1970 is when the epoch started. 3:03 And we've kicked up one second for every second since then. 3:08 So, what if I wanna get now's time stamp? 3:11 The POSIX time stamp for now. 3:16 And there we go. 3:19 We have this huge number and then .31 whatever. 3:20 So the reason it's a float is because it's always at some point of the second. 3:23 We've, we're not necessarily at the absolute beginning or the absolute. 3:27 Well, we know we're at the beginning to get zero of the second. 3:30 We're somewhere in the middle. 3:33 So we are a third of the way through the second, when we did the now.time stamp. 3:34 Now, this uses your local system time. 3:40 In this case, it uses the server that work space is running on, 3:43 because we don't have a timezone in here. 3:47 You don't always need the POSIX time stamp, but 3:48 when you do it's very handy to be able to get one. 3:50 The attributes on datetime objects are really handy, and make working with 3:53 datetimes more pleasant, because you can get to just the data that you want. 3:57 In our next video, we're gonna talk about how to get that data out in 4:00 even more customizable formats. 4:03