Python in a Nutshell

Chapter 12. Time Operations

A Python program can handle time in several ways. Time intervals are represented by floating-point numbers, in units of seconds (a fraction of a second is the fractional part of the interval). Particular instants in time are expressed in seconds since a reference instant, known as the epoch. (Midnight, UTC, of January 1, 1970, is a popular epoch used on both Unix and Windows platforms.) Time instants often also need to be expressed as a mixture of units of measurement (e.g., years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds), particularly for I/O purposes.

This chapter covers the time module, which supplies Python’s core time-handling functionality. The time module strongly depends on the system C library. The chapter also presents the sched and calendar modules and the essentials of the popular extension module mx.DateTime. mx.DateTime has more uniform behavior across platforms than time, which helps account for its popularity.

Python 2.3 will introduce a new datetime module to manipulate dates and times in other ways. At http://starship.python.net/crew/jbauer/normaldate/, you can download Jeff Bauer’s normalDate.py, which gains simplicity by dealing only with dates, not with times. Neither of these modules is further covered in this book.

The time Module

The underlying C library determines the range of dates that the time module can handle. On Unix systems, years 1970 and 2038 are the typical cut-off points, a limitation that mx.DateTime lets you ...