Get Current time

In this article, you will learn to get current time of your locale as well as different time zones in Python.

There are a number of ways you can take to get current time in Python.

Example 1: Current time using datetime object

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now()

current_time = now.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("Current Time =", current_time)

Output

Current Time = 07:41:19

In the above example, we have imported datetime class from the datetime module. Then, we used now() method to get a datetime object containing current date and time.

Using datetime.strftime() method, we then created a string representing current time.

If you need to create a time object containing current time, you can do something like this.

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now().time() # time object

print("now =", now)
print("type(now) =", type(now))	

Output

now = 07:43:37.457423
type(now) = <class 'datetime.time'>

Example 2: Current time using time module

You can also get the current time using time module.

import time

t = time.localtime()
current_time = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S", t)
print(current_time)

Output

07:46:58

Example 3: Current time of a timezone

If you need to find current time of a certain timezone, you can use pytZ module.

from datetime import datetime
import pytz

tz_NY = pytz.timezone('America/New_York') 
datetime_NY = datetime.now(tz_NY)
print("NY time:", datetime_NY.strftime("%H:%M:%S"))

tz_London = pytz.timezone('Europe/London')
datetime_London = datetime.now(tz_London)
print("London time:", datetime_London.strftime("%H:%M:%S"))

Output

NY time: 03:45:16
London time: 08:45:16