How to set a variable to be “Today's” date in Python/Pandas

Question

I am trying to set a variable to equal today\'s date.

I looked this up and found a related article:

Set today date as default value in the model

Howe

Answer 1

You can also look into pandas.Timestamp, which includes methods like .now and .today. Unlike pandas.to_datetime('now'), pandas.Timestamp.now() won't default to UTC:

  import pandas as pd

  pd.Timestamp.now() # will return California time
  # Timestamp('2018-12-19 09:17:07.693648')

  pd.to_datetime('now') # will return UTC time
  # Timestamp('2018-12-19 17:17:08')