How do I get the Python UTC datetime in which hours, minutes, and seconds are all zeroes?

Question

I'm using Python 3.8. Is there a simpler way to get the current UTC time in which the hour, minute, and second are all zero? For example, if UTC now evalutes to "2020-09-24 12:34:45", I would want my result to be "2020-09-24 00:00:00". Right now I have

today = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
today_wo_time_str = datetime.datetime.strftime(today, '%Y-%m-%d 00:00:00')
today_wo_time_obj = datetime.datetime.stpftime(today_wo_time_str, '%Y-%m-%d 00:00:00')

which seems a little unecessarily wordy.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime.replace — jonrsharpe, Sep 24 '20 at 15:43
`datetime.now(timezone.utc).replace(hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)` — FObersteiner, Sep 24 '20 at 15:52
@MrFuppes, if you want to put that as the answer, I'll accept. — Dave, Sep 24 '20 at 16:29
@Dave: I noted that my comment is basically the linked answer, only that I added UTC as time zone - so it's alright. — FObersteiner, Sep 24 '20 at 16:33

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 24 '20 at 15:42

0

One option would be get the current UTC datetime, as you are already doing, and then combine its date only component with a midnight time component, using the combine() function.

import datetime

utc_now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
midnight = datetime.time(0)
utc_midnight = datetime.datetime.combine(utc_now.date(), midnight)
print(utc_midnight)

This prints:

2020-09-24 00:00:00

answered Sep 24 '20 at 15:42

Tim Biegeleisen

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this has two lines which aren't needed *and* uses [utcnow](https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2019/11/utcnow.html) ;-) – FObersteiner Sep 24 '20 at 15:53

How do I get the Python UTC datetime in which hours, minutes, and seconds are all zeroes?

1 Answers1