Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The mx.DateTime Module

DateTime is one of the modules in the mx package made available by eGenix GmbH. mx is mostly open source, and, at the time of this writing, mx.DateTime has liberal license conditions similar to those of Python itself. mx.DateTime’s popularity stems from its functional richness and cross-platform portability. I present only an essential subset of mx.DateTime’s rich functionality here; the module comes with detailed documentation about its advanced time- and date-handling features.

Date and Time Types

Package DateTime supplies several date and time types whose instances are immutable (thus, suitable as dictionary keys). Type DateTime represents a time instant and includes an absolute date, the number of days since an epoch of January 1, year 1 CE, according to the Gregorian calendar (0001-01-01 is day 1), and an absolute time, a floating-point number of seconds since midnight. Type DateTimeDelta represents an interval of time, which is a floating-point number of seconds. Class RelativeDateTime lets you specify dates in relative terms, such as “next Monday” or “first day of next month.” DateTime and DateTimeDelta are covered in detail (respectively in The DateTime Type and The DateTimeDelta Type), but RelativeDateTime is not.

Date and time types supply customized string conversion, invoked via the built-in str or automatically during implicit conversion (e.g., in a print statement). The resulting strings are in standard ISO8601 formats, such as:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.ss ...