Getting today's date in YYYY-MM-DD in Python?

I'm using:

str(datetime.datetime.today()).split()[0]

to return today's date in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

Is there a less crude way to achieve this?

Solution 1:

You can use strftime:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
'2021-01-26'

Additionally, for anyone also looking for a zero-padded Hour, Minute, and Second at the end: (Comment by Gabriel Staples)

>>> datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S')
'2021-01-26-16:50:03'

Solution 2:

You can use datetime.date.today() and convert the resulting datetime.date object to a string:

from datetime import date
today = str(date.today())
print(today)   # '2017-12-26'

Solution 3:

I always use the isoformat() method for this.

from datetime import date    
today = date.today().isoformat()
print(today)  # '2018-12-05'

Note that this also works on datetime objects if you need the time in the standard ISO 8601 format as well.

from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.today().isoformat()
print(now)  # '2018-12-05T11:15:55.126382'