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 mention you are using Pandas (in your title). If so, there is no need to use an external library, you can just use to_datetime

>>> pandas.to_datetime('today').normalize()
Timestamp('2015-10-14 00:00:00')

This will always return today's date at midnight, irrespective of the actual time, and can be directly used in pandas to do comparisons etc. Pandas always includes 00:00:00 in its datetimes.

Replacing today with now would give you the date in UTC instead of local time; note that in neither case is the tzinfo (timezone) added.

In pandas versions prior to 0.23.x, normalize may not have been necessary to remove the non-midnight timestamp.

Answer 2

If you want a string mm/dd/yyyy instead of the datetime object, you can use strftime (string format time):

>>> dt.datetime.today().strftime("%m/%d/%Y")
                   # ^ note parentheses
'02/12/2014'