Get current timestamp using Python

A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information used to find when a particular event occurred, generally giving the date and time of the day, accurate to a small fraction of a second. In this article, we will learn how to Get current timestamp in Python. There are different ways to get current timestamp in Python, We can use functions from modules time, datetime and calendar. 1. Using module time : The time module provides various time-related functions. The function time, return 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.

Output:

1594819641.9622827

  2. Using module datetime : 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.

Output:

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

  3. Using module calendar : 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.

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