Get Current Timestamp Using Python

A timestamp is a sequence of characters that represents the date and time at which a particular event occurred, often accurate to fractions of a second. Timestamps are essential in logging events, tracking files, and handling date-time data in various applications.

Here, we will learn how to get the current timestamp in Python.

How to Get the Current Timestamp in Python

There are 3 different ways to get the current timestamp in Python, We can use functions from modules time, datetime, and calendar.

1. Using the time Module

The time module provides various time-related functions. The function time returns the time in seconds since the epoch as a floating point number. epoch is defined as the point where the time starts and is platform-dependent.

Syntax: time.time()
Parameters: NA
Return: floating point number expressed in seconds.

# using time module
import time

# ts stores the time in seconds
ts = time.time()

# print the current timestamp
print(ts)

Output:

1594819641.9622827

Use Case: This method is useful when you need to work with formatted dates and times but still want the ability to extract the corresponding Unix timestamp.

 2. Using the datetime Module

The datetime module provides classes for manipulating dates and times. While date and time arithmetic is supported, the target of the implementation is on efficient attribute extraction for output formatting and manipulation. The function datetime.datetime.now which return number of seconds since the epoch.

Syntax: datetime.now()
Parameters: tz (time zone) which is optional.
Return: the current local date and time.

# using datetime module
import datetime;

# ct stores current time
ct = datetime.datetime.now()
print("current time:-", ct)

# ts store timestamp of current time
ts = ct.timestamp()
print("timestamp:-", ts)

Output:

current time:- 2020-07-15 14:30:26.159446
timestamp:- 1594823426.159446

Use Case: This method is useful when you need to work with formatted dates and times but still want the ability to extract the corresponding Unix timestamp.

3. Using the calendar Module

We can also get timestamp by combining multiple functions from multiple modules. In this we’ll use function calendar.timegm to convert tuple representing current time.

Syntax: calendar.timegm(tuple)
Parameters: takes a time tuple such as returned by the gmtime() function in the time module.
Return: the corresponding Unix timestamp value.

# using calendar module
# using time module
import calendar;
import time;

# gmt stores current gmtime
gmt = time.gmtime()
print("gmt:-", gmt)

# ts stores timestamp
ts = calendar.timegm(gmt)
print("timestamp:-", ts)

Output:

gmt:- time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=19, tm_min=21, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=197, tm_isdst=0) timestamp:- 1594840866

Use Case: This method is helpful when dealing with UTC or when you need to convert structured time data (like from gmtime()) into a timestamp

Summary

• time.time(): Returns the current time in seconds as a floating-point number since the epoch. Best for simple time calculations and logging.
• datetime.now(): Provides the current local date and time. Use .timestamp() to convert to Unix time. Ideal for date-time manipulation and formatting.
• calendar.timegm(): Converts a structured time tuple to a Unix timestamp. Useful when working with UTC or structured time data

ashishguru9803

Follow

Improve

Article Tags :

• Python
• Python Pandas-Timestamp

Practice Tags :

• python