Extracting Information

Extracting Information

Notice how we got an output of the form2012-07-19 12:50:53.180759. That's pretty ugly.

Let's examine how to extract portions of the date and time to eventually print out a "prettier" form of this information.

Let's start by retrieving the month, day, and year from the result of datetime.now(). To do this, we can use our variable now in the following way: current_year = now.year.

Of course, the variable on the left-hand side of the assignment could be named anything.

The fact that we can extract parts of the date in such an elegant syntax is pretty awesome. As you could guess, we can use a similar syntax to extract the month andday.

Note: Don't worry about the details of the notation now.year. It's called dot notationand it's used to access data from an object.We mentioned this briefly in Unit 2 and will talk much more about objects later.

from datetime import datetime
now=datetime.now()
current_year = now.year
current_month=now.month
current_day=now.day
print now.year
print now.month
print now.day
print("%d\n%d\n%d" %(current_month,current_day,current_year))
print("type(now)=%s\ntype(now.year)=%s\ntype(now.month)=%s\ntype(now.day)=%s"%(type(now),type(current_year),type(current_month),type(current_day)))