Timestamps

Scope

The following presents a standardised way for forming timestamps.

Definition

Timestamps should be formulated as a string following this pattern according to the ISO 8601 standard:

yyyyMMddTHHMMSS

Here, yyyy standards for a four-digit year, e.g., 2023, MM is the month, e.g., 01 for January, dd for the day of the year, e.g., 01 for the first of the month.

The T is a separator between date specification and time specification.

The time specification follows HH for hours, MM for minutes, and SS for seconds. As an example, 18:33:22 corresponds to 6 pm, minute 33 at second 22. When no second information is available, the SS information should be set to 00.

Generating the timestamp

To generate such a timestamp in Python, you can use the following command:

from datetime import datetime

timestamp = datetime.now().strftime("%Y%m%dT%H%M%S")
print(timestamp)

This code snippet retrieves the current date and time using datetime.now() and then formats it according to the desired pattern %Y%m%dT%H%M%S. The %Y represents the four-digit year, %m represents the two-digit month, %d represents the two-digit day, %H represents the two-digit hour in 24-hour format, %M represents the two-digit minute, and %S represents the two-digit second.

The output will be a string representing the current timestamp in the yyyyMMddTHHMMSS format, following the ISO 8601 standard.