How to extract the year from a Python datetime object?

Question

It's in fact almost the same in Python.. :-)

import datetime
year = datetime.date.today().year

Of course, date doesn't have a time associated, so if you care about that too, you can do the same with a complete datetime object:

import datetime
year = datetime.datetime.today().year

(Obviously no different, but you can store datetime.datetime.today() in a variable before you grab the year, of course).

One key thing to note is that the time components can differ between 32-bit and 64-bit pythons in some python versions (2.5.x tree I think). So you will find things like hour/min/sec on some 64-bit platforms, while you get hour/minute/second on 32-bit.

import datetime
a = datetime.datetime.today().year

or even (as Lennart suggested)

a = datetime.datetime.now().year

or even

a = datetime.date.today().year

The other answers to this question seem to hit it spot on. Now how would you figure this out for yourself without stack overflow? Check out IPython, an interactive Python shell that has tab auto-complete.

> ipython
import Python 2.5 (r25:51908, Nov  6 2007, 16:54:01)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 0.8.2.svn.r2750 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object'. ?object also works, ?? prints more.

In [1]: import datetime
In [2]: now=datetime.datetime.now()
In [3]: now.

press tab a few times and you'll be prompted with the members of the "now" object:

now.__add__           now.__gt__            now.__radd__          now.__sub__           now.fromordinal       now.microsecond       now.second            now.toordinal         now.weekday
now.__class__         now.__hash__          now.__reduce__        now.astimezone        now.fromtimestamp     now.min               now.strftime          now.tzinfo            now.year
now.__delattr__       now.__init__          now.__reduce_ex__     now.combine           now.hour              now.minute            now.strptime          now.tzname
now.__doc__           now.__le__            now.__repr__          now.ctime             now.isocalendar       now.month             now.time              now.utcfromtimestamp
now.__eq__            now.__lt__            now.__rsub__          now.date              now.isoformat         now.now               now.timetuple         now.utcnow
now.__ge__            now.__ne__            now.__setattr__       now.day               now.isoweekday        now.replace           now.timetz            now.utcoffset
now.__getattribute__  now.__new__           now.__str__           now.dst               now.max               now.resolution        now.today             now.utctimetuple

and you'll see that now.year is a member of the "now" object.

If you want the year from a (unknown) datetime-object:

tijd = datetime.datetime(9999, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59)

>>> tijd.timetuple()
time.struct_time(tm_year=9999, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=23, tm_min=59, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=365, tm_isdst=-1)
>>> tijd.timetuple().tm_year
9999