Timestamp to datetime

In this article, you will learn to convert timestamp to datetime object and datetime object to timestamp (with the help of examples).

It's pretty common to store date and time as a timestamp in a database. A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds between a particular date and January 1, 1970 at UTC.

Example 1: Python timestamp to datetime

from datetime import datetime

timestamp = 1545730073
dt_object = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)

print("dt_object =", dt_object)
print("type(dt_object) =", type(dt_object))

When you run the program, the output will be:

dt_object = 2018-12-25 09:27:53
type(dt_object) = <class 'datetime.datetime'>

Here, we have imported datetime class from the datetime module. Then, we used datetime.fromtimestamp() classmethod which returns the local date and time (datetime object). This object is stored in dt_object variable.

Note: You can easily create a string representing date and time from a datetime object using strftime() method.

Example 2: Python datetime to timestamp

You can get timestamp from a datetime object using datetime.timestamp() method.

from datetime import datetime

# current date and time
now = datetime.now()

timestamp = datetime.timestamp(now)
print("timestamp =", timestamp)