How to get an UTC date string in Python? [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to get utc date string as "YYYYMMDD"

For now I do the following,

nowTime =  time.gmtime(); nowDate = date(nowTime.tm_year, nowTime.tm_mon, nowTime.tm_mday) print nowDate.strftime('%Y%m%d') 

I used to do:

datetime.date.today().strftime() 

but this gives me date string in local TZ

How can I get an UTC date string?

Answer 1

from datetime import datetime, timezone datetime.now(timezone.utc).strftime("%Y%m%d") 

Or as Davidism pointed out, this would also work:

from datetime import datetime datetime.utcnow().strftime("%Y%m%d") 

I prefer the first approach, as it gets you in the habit of using timezone aware datetimes - but as J.F. Sebastian pointed out - it requires Python 3.2+. The second approach will work in both 2.7 and 3.2 branches.