How to get an UTC date string in Python?

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?

Asked By: GJain

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Source

Answer 1

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.

Answered By: Matt Johnson-Pint

How to get an UTC date string in Python?

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