time

This module provides various functions to manipulate time values.

There are two standard representations of time. One is the number of seconds since the Epoch, in UTC (a.k.a. GMT). It may be an integer or a floating point number (to represent fractions of seconds). The Epoch is system-defined; on Unix, it is generally January 1st, 1970. The actual value can be retrieved by calling gmtime(0).

The other representation is a tuple of 9 integers giving local time. The tuple items are:

year (four digits, e.g. 1998) month (1-12) day (1-31) hours (0-23) minutes (0-59) seconds (0-59) weekday (0-6, Monday is 0) Julian day (day in the year, 1-366) DST (Daylight Savings Time) flag (-1, 0 or 1)

If the DST flag is 0, the time is given in the regular time zone; if it is 1, the time is given in the DST time zone; if it is -1, mktime() should guess based on the date and time.

Variables:

timezone – difference in seconds between UTC and local standard time altzone – difference in seconds between UTC and local DST time daylight – whether local time should reflect DST tzname – tuple of (standard time zone name, DST time zone name)

Functions:

time() – return current time in seconds since the Epoch as a float clock() – return CPU time since process start as a float sleep() – delay for a number of seconds given as a float gmtime() – convert seconds since Epoch to UTC tuple localtime() – convert seconds since Epoch to local time tuple asctime() – convert time tuple to string ctime() – convert time in seconds to string mktime() – convert local time tuple to seconds since Epoch strftime() – convert time tuple to string according to format specification strptime() – parse string to time tuple according to format specification tzset() – change the local timezone

Functions

asctime(([tuple]) -> string) Convert a time tuple to a string, e.g.
clock(() -> floating point number) Return the CPU time or real time since the start of the process or since the first call to clock().
ctime((seconds) -> string) Convert a time in seconds since the Epoch to a string in local time.
gmtime([seconds]) -> (tm_year, tm_mon, ...) tm_sec, tm_wday, tm_yday, tm_isdst)
localtime(...) tm_sec,tm_wday,tm_yday,tm_isdst)
mktime((tuple) -> floating point number) Convert a time tuple in local time to seconds since the Epoch.
sleep(seconds) Delay execution for a given number of seconds.
strftime((format[, tuple]) -> string) Convert a time tuple to a string according to a format specification.
strptime((string, format) -> struct_time) Parse a string to a time tuple according to a format specification.
time(() -> floating point number) Return the current time in seconds since the Epoch.
tzset() Initialize, or reinitialize, the local timezone to the value stored in os.environ[‘TZ’].

Classes

struct_time The time value as returned by gmtime(), localtime(), and strptime(), and accepted by asctime(), mktime() and strftime().