Python dates

Timestamps

# This gives the same results as time.time().
(datetime.datetime.utcnow() - datetime.datetime(1970,1,1)).total_seconds()
time.time()

import datetime
datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f UTC")

Date arithmetic

Python has built-in support for doing date arithmetic. Here are some examples:

import datetime

year = '2008'
month = '1'
day = '24'

# This shows how to create a datetime object based 32 days in the past.
last_month = datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=32)
# This creates a datetime object from the now time.
now = datetime.datetime.now()
# Make some other datetime from strings. I do this if I parse dates from a string.
other_date = datetime.datetime(year=int(year), month=int(month), day=int(day))
# This does some simple date arithmetic to calculate how many days old something is.
if (now - other_date).days > 31:
    print("Older than a month.")
# Datetimestamp strings  (DTS) are always handy for naming things.
# This creates a string encoding of the current date and time at UTC 0.
# Use localtime() instead of gmtime() if you want time in your current timezone.
dts_string = ("%04d%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d" % time.gmtime()[0:6])