CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondatetime
lserlohn
lserlohn

Reputation: 6206

why datetime object sometimes return date, and sometimes return date and time?

I got a wired problem.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
start_date = '2019-05-01'
end_date = '2020-04-30'

start_date = datetime.strptime(start_date, "%Y-%m-%d")
print(start_date)

new_start_date = (datetime.strptime(end_date, '%Y-%m-%d') - timedelta(days=360)).strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
print(new_start_date)

The return is

2019-05-01 00:00:00
2019-05-06

It looks like, the first "start_date" contains date and time, and the second "new_start_date" only has date. Why? How can I make change to let the first "start_date" return only date, no time?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 790

Answers (2)

PacketLoss
PacketLoss

Reputation: 5746

strptime returns a datetime object. Documentation

classmethod datetime.strptime(date_string, format)

Return a datetime corresponding to date_string, parsed according to format.

Where as strftime returns a string specified by your formatting string. Documentation

date.strftime(format)

Return a string representing the date, controlled by an explicit format string. Format codes referring to hours, minutes or seconds will see 0 values. For a complete list of formatting directives, see strftime() and strptime() Behavior.

In your example;

datetime.strptime(start_date, "%Y-%m-%d") #2019-05-01 00:00:00

However if you were to use strftime to format this, it would proceed to remove the time;

datetime.strptime(start_date, "%Y-%m-%d").strftime('%Y-%m-%d')) #2019-05-01

Upvotes: 1

Klaus Moon
Klaus Moon

Reputation: 1

new_start_date is not a date, it is a string. You can remove strftime to get the datetime object.

Upvotes: 0

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