Python date/time format conversion

In this post, you will learn how to use the Python datetime module to convert time data to a desired format or type, as shown below.

• Convert time to minutes seconds
• Convert time to a Unix timestamp int number
• Convert to UTC time
• Convert time from a dataframe
• Convert to a string

1. Convert Time to Seconds

If you want to convert a time to seconds, you can use the total_seconds() method of a timedelta object.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
 
# create timedelta object
td = timedelta(hours=2, minutes=30)
seconds = td.total_seconds()
 
print(f"Total seconds: {seconds}")

2. Convert Time to Minutes

Likewise, to convert time to minutes, you can divide the result of the total_seconds() method by 60.

minutes = seconds / 60
print(f"Total minutes: {minutes}")

3. Convert Datetime to Integer

To convert a datetime object to a Unix timestamp, you can use the timestamp() method.

timestamp = int(dt.timestamp())
print(f"Unix timestamp: {timestamp}")

4. Convert Datetime to UTC

To convert a datetime object to UTC, you can use the astimezone() method with the pytz library.

import pytz
 
utc_time = dt.astimezone(pytz.utc)
print(f"UTC time: {utc_time}")

5. Convert Time Format in DataFrame

To convert the time format in a Pandas DataFrame, you can use the pd.to_datetime() function.

import pandas as pd
 
# data with date and time
data = {'date_time': ['2023-07-07 10:30', '2023-07-08 11:45', '2023-07-09 12:50']}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
 
# convert string to datetime object
df['date_time'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_time'])
 
print(df)

6. Convert Datetime to String

You can convert a datetime object to a string using the strftime() method.

date_str = dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
print(f"Date string: {date_str}")

Conclusion

Python's datetime module is very effective for time conversion tasks. In this post, we've seen how to utilize the functionalities of the datetime module for time conversion. By leveraging these features, you can handle time conversion tasks more easily and efficiently.