timeThis module provides various time-related functions. It is always available.
An explanation of some terminology and conventions is in order.
gmtime(0).time() and sleep()
is better than their Unix equivalents: times are expressed as floating
point numbers, time() returns the most accurate time available
(using Unix gettimeofday() where available), and sleep()
will accept a time with a nonzero fraction (Unix select() is
used to implement this, where available).gmtime() and localtime(),
or as accpted by mktime() is a tuple of 9
integers: year (e.g. 1993), month (1-12), day (1-31), hour
(0-23), minute (0-59), second (0-59), weekday (0-6, monday is 0),
Julian day (1-366) and daylight savings flag (-1, 0 or 1).
Note that unlike the C structure, the month value is a range of 1-12, not
0-11. A year value less than 100 will typically be silently converted to
1900 plus the year value. A -1 argument as daylight savings flag, passed to
mktime() will usually result in the correct daylight savings
state to be filled in.
The module defines the following functions and data items:
daylight is nonzero.
gmtime() or
localtime() to a 24-character string of the following form:
'Sun Jun 20 23:21:05 1993'. Note: unlike the C function of
the same name, there is no trailing newline.
ctime(t) is equivalent to
asctime(localtime(t)).
gmtime but converts to local time. The dst flag is set
to 1 when DST applies to the given time.
localtime. Its argument is the
full 9-tuple (since the dst flag is needed -- pass -1 as the dst flag if
it is unknown) which expresses the time
in local time, not UTC. It returns a floating
point number, for compatibility with time.time(). If the input
value can't be represented as a valid time, OverflowError is raised.
gmtime() or
localtime() to a string as specified by the format argument.
The following directives, shown without the optional field width and precision specification, are replaced by the indicated characters:
Additional directives may be supported on certain platforms, but only the ones listed here have a meaning standardized by ANSI C.
On some platforms, an optional field width and precision specification can immediately follow the initial % of a directive in the following order; this is also not portable. The field width is normally 2 except for %j where it is 3.