How do you format time to be in 24-hours using Python?
In Python you can format a
datetime
object to be displayed in 24-hour time using the format
%H:%M
. This is not to be confused with the 12-hour time which uses the format
%I:%M
and may have
%p
appended to the end to denote
AM/PM
.
Here’s an example demonstrating the conversion of time from 12-hour format to a 24-hour format:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> d = "2022-08-31 1:30PM"
>>> datetime.strptime(d, "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M%p")
datetime.datetime(2022, 8, 31, 13, 30)
As you can see from the above code the original string
d
contains the year followed by the month and then the day of the month along with the time in 12-hour format. To get Python to interpret this string into a
datetime
object you instruct Python using the format strings in the second parameter of the
datetime.strptime()
method.
%Y
is the year as a four-digit number,
%m
is the month as a two-digit number,
%d
is the day of the month as a two-digit number,
%I
is the hour in 12-hour time,
%M
(capital m) is the minute and
%p
is the AM/PM designation.
As you can see from the result the
datetime
object outputs the year, month, day, hour in 24-hour time, and minute.
To output this
datetime
object in 24-hour time you can use an f-string with the format style, like so:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> d = "2022-08-31 1:30PM"
>>> t = datetime.strptime(d, "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M%p")
>>> f"{t:%H%M}"
'13:30'
As you can see from the above result the outcome of getting 24-hour time is achieved! The f-string enables the use of styling the string using the format modifier and by using the datetime format tags you can output the hour in 24-hour format with
%H
and the minute would not change (
%M
).
Summary
The above explains how to format time in Python to be in 24-hour time instead of 12-hour time. It goes over how to use the format string
%H:%M
to obtain the desired result from a datetime object in 24-hour time. Additionally, you have seen how to use the f-string format modifier to display the datetime object in 24-hour time.
