How to get an UTC date string in Python? [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to get utc date string as "YYYYMMDD"

For now I do the following,

nowTime =  time.gmtime();
nowDate = date(nowTime.tm_year, nowTime.tm_mon, nowTime.tm_mday)
print nowDate.strftime('%Y%m%d')

I used to do:

datetime.date.today().strftime()

but this gives me date string in local TZ

How can I get an UTC date string?

Matt Johnson-Pint · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-24 20:03:54Z

100

from datetime import datetime, timezone
datetime.now(timezone.utc).strftime("%Y%m%d")

Or as Davidism pointed out, this would also work:

from datetime import datetime
datetime.utcnow().strftime("%Y%m%d")

I prefer the first approach, as it gets you in the habit of using timezone aware datetimes - but as J.F. Sebastian pointed out - it requires Python 3.2+. The second approach will work in both 2.7 and 3.2 branches.

edited Jul 24, 2013 at 20:03

answered Jul 23, 2013 at 22:44

Matt Johnson-Pint

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2 Comments

IntelligenceGuidedByExperience Over a year ago

as of 2024-10-02 in Python 3.12.7 the following results in an error: datetime.now(datetime.UTC) AttributeError: type object 'datetime.datetime' has no attribute UTC

Matt Johnson-Pint Over a year ago

@user3785010 - check your code carefully. Nowhere in my examples did I write datetime.UTC.

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