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so at some point you gonna have to start
dealing with dates and times in your

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Python programs and although this
should be easy there are actually

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several pitfalls which just a really
they're waiting to trap the unwary

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now there is two main sources of problems with dates
and times

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localization and daylight saving and
they can really complicates things if

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you don't handle them correctly or not
handled correctly now localization

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that covers both the time in any
particular place and also the

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format used to represent dates in that
particular location and there's not

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necessarily any rhyme or reason to
this so as an example in Hoyt Mongolia Lasara

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in China and Dhaka in Bangladesh lay on the line running on almost due north-south

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but at 10 a.m. in Hoyt is 11 a.m. in
Lhasa and 9 a.m. in Dhaka so the UK

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is part of the European Union but most
of Western Europe is one hour ahead now

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daylight savings time

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abbreviated to DST that involves moving
the clocks forward in spring resulting in

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everyone getting up 1 hour earlier to take
advantage of the extra daylight as the

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Sun rises earlier in the morning now
clocks are then put back one hour in

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autumn but not every country practices
daylight saving though for example the

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Philippines don't and that's why I've
explained what it is for you in case you are

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not aware of what you know daylight
saving time is and its practiced in

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Australia and I we've actually got at some
points in time three different times

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zones in Australia covering these and I know at least
that many in the united states in fact

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most of Africa India and Asia don't mess
around with their clocks and even in America

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some states such as Arizona
don't bother with daylight saving time

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at all but in the UK the actual dates
when the clock would changed use to be set

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each year by a special meeting of
Admiralty which meant that you wouldn't

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be sure you couldn't be sure that when
the change from one year to the next

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fortunately countries that do observe
daylight savings now make the dates

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known for several years in advance and
that's so that computer operating

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systems like Windows and Linux Mac can maintain files with date which are sent

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down to individual computers as part of
their normal update process you can imagine the sort of

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the chaos

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if they didn't know ahead of time when
daylight saving was meant to change your

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computer and have the wrong date and time
so for scientific and computer

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applications its usual to work in
Coordinated Universal Time that's

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abbreviated to UTC is not a misspelling
UTC was chosen as a compromise between

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the English and French translations
so in French the abbreviation would have

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been TUC for temps universel coordonné not that I can speak French very well as

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the English and the French have a long
history of not agreeing on anything

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UTC was chosen as a compromise and you
may also find UTC interestingly enough

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referred to also Zulu time now

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dates and times in computer applications and
they're usually stored as UTC together

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with an offset to represent the number
of hours ahead of or behind UTC and a flag

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to indicate if daylight savings time applies
unless you can be sure that your program

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will only ever be used in your current
time zone and frankly with the world

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wide internet it's really a bad
assumption to do that though what you should do

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is adopt this method rather than
storing local time in other

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words you should really be storing your
dates as UTC and with that offset as I mentioned for

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a particular time zone and now how does this relate to Python well the Python standard library provides three

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modules to help us deal with dates and
times and that's the time date time and

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calendar modules generally if you just
dealing with elapsed time and that would

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be things like timing how long a program
takes to execute

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and we will be doing that shortly then the time
module will be all we need but if you dealing

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with actual dates and times and date time
would be more useful now the help for the

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time model doesn't include a link so what I'm going to do is open up the link and put the

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link in the Resources section so open up a browser and we ill refer to this a few times so it can be useful

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to have a look at this page so as can see
this is the documentation for the time

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and we will as i mentioned with refer to this will come
back to this a few times so some of the

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documentation like what we've seen in the
past with Python can be confusing and

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the reason particularly with time in
Python is that it discusses the underlying

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c libraries Python uses to provide this time support

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because c was closely tied to UNIX
systems documentation also talks about

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UNIX systems a lot but most functions
also work on windows in order to make our

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code portable across operating systems
we're not going to look at any UNIX only

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functions were going to restrict
ourselves to the general

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functions at work on all operating systems
and we've discussed most of the terms in

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the terminology convention section of
the document but we haven't

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mentioned rather epok so that
c libraries work by storing the number

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of seconds since start date and that's
referred to generously as the epoc and in Python

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on Linux Windows and Mac this is
January 1 1970 now

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dates before these are represented by negative number although with that said there is a warning that dates

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before the start of the epoch may not be
handled but if your dealing with historical

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dates and it's actually probably a good
idea to store them as strings in a

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standard format such as you know y y
y y dash mm dash dd otherwise

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storing and manipulating dates as strings is not really a good idea and

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it's note worth noting  that a 32 bit signed
integer will overflow up to two billion 147

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483648 and
that many seconds after first of January

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1970 is sometime in February
2038 so the bottom line is the

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dates this is not going to work as of
Feb 2038 because we are going to be overflowing with 32bit integer

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so physically the computer wont be able to store the
right number to sort of track forward

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but hopefully by then

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we still got a bit of time all of these
computers will be at least 64 bit but if

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you happen to be using 32 bit operating
system now in 20 odd years time I'll

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be asking but secondly we're dealing with
dates with them if you are going to be using that ok so a

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lot of theory there it is time to get in to do
some code so let's go and see some of

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the time functions in action so go back to IntelliJ
and open up and I've

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created a new project going to create a
new Python file and call it datecalc

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could just have been called literally
anything and lets print some time

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structures from the epoch date or the
system that we're running

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on my system is on a Mac so we can
start by typing...

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....

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00:07:01,960 --> 00:07:11,450
...lets run that and we'll talk about each of the options

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so line 3 specifies the number of seconds is 0 so
essentially that's gonna represent the

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start of the epoch now the GMT time
function is also used to convert this

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into tuple in GMT time always works in
UTC so to get the local time we

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can use the local time function like you
can see on line 5 and that converts

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the time in seconds as the start of the epock as well into a tuple and you can see the first print out you

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can see that's clearly a tuple and its got the information relating to the

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dates the first example from line 3 output remember I mentioned that Jan 1st 1970

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and because we specified 0 its come back to
that date automatically and the second

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example local time it's picked up on the
fact that today in Australia is the 13th of

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January

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so the date is 13th month is one in 2016
and it's even got the time there

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13 49 15 obviously 1:49 in the afternoon

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essentially because we didn't specify
the epoch it's defaulting to today's date and we

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could have also if you wanted to because you can see the third
example time.time and that's

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actually printed out the number of
seconds since the start of an epoch

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that's the number of seconds since the
first the first 1970 so

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we could have change the line on the code on line 5 and if we wanted to

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we could have made that time....

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...to call the time function and run that

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and you can see we got the similar results there so the
documentation states that GM time

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and local time convert the number of
seconds into a struct_time

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and that's actually named tuple so we are going to be looking at how to create our owned named tuples

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later in the course this is a good
opportunity to see how to use them so

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they just like order tuples that
we've seen previously in the course but also

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they allow the individual items in a
tuple to be accessed using a name and

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that can be very useful way to make
a code much more readable

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what will do is we will assign the current local time to a
variable which can be a tuple and use

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both methods to access the individual items so you can see what I mean so I'm going to delete those two examples I'm going to put...

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....

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...so we can print the year here

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and will just run this first so run that and I made a typo so just change that, that should be

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underscore here and try running it again and you can see we got the
year and we got two ways of out putting it 2016 the

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month and the day and that is the correct date because we've
selected local time or using local

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time in Australia's as I'm recording the
video so you can basically print the year using

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the tuple either the way we previously
seen using index 0 so that's this first

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example time_here 0 in square brackets but we can also use
the name so it's time_here

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.tm_year and that's the named
tuple so there's no practical

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difference between the two ways but
using the name does make it more obvious

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which fields are being accessed because obviously you contrast
time_here

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is 0 in square brackets as year that's a lot harder than trying to figure out that is a year but this second part here

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time_here.tm_year you
probably think ok this must be the

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year so other than the fact that it's
easy to read there is no other differences no

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other reason or practical difference
between the two ways because both

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methods really do return the same value
so name tuples are very useful and we will look at

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how to create our own as I mentioned after
we have covered classes and that is going to be

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later in the course but for now whenever you see a

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named tuple mention in the documentation
you can treat it just like an ordinary

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tuple with the advantage of accessing
the individual fields I should say in the

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tuple by their names so to have a look at how we can measure elapse time Python we are going to create a very

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simple reaction time game once the game
has started it is gonna wait for a random number

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of seconds before displaying a message
on the screen and that's going to

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measure the time it takes the player to
press enter so let us start typing some of the code

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because Python does provide a
number of ways to measure the elapse time

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so we are gonna look at each one in turn so we are going to comment out the code we got in here

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actually I'll leave the import in because we need that actually what I'll do is start typing down here so we are going to put...

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....

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....you can see we are specifying a random delay

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between 1 and 6 and we are going to sleep for that
many seconds so...

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...now we are going to ask them to press Enter
to stop....

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...so we are going to basically recording the start
time before enter was press and then end

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time afterwards and from there we can figure out how long
it took so from there we can put...

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.....

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.....same output but we are going to change
the parameter we are passing to...

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......

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.....

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...so that is our program and lets talk about
some of the code firstly the on line

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12 the from time using import
statement in that form is very useful

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when experimenting with different
implementations of files and modules but

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generally speaking you wouldn't leave
that in production code so one reason is that

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it can be very hard for anyone else to know that
my_timer is actually the time

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functions from the standard library and that
probably expected to be your own

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function until they go back to the start
of the code and check the imports so once

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again remember that your modules can contain hundreds of
lines of code and in this example it's

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obviously very quick because its all in one
screen but you do want to consider

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maintenance of your code down the
track now the reaction game is pretty simple

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uses the random module to generate a
random number of seconds between one and

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six which you can see on line 17 and then
on line 18 it uses time.sleep

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where it actually basically sleeps with that amount of time

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when it wakes up it stores the current time in start time and displays a message using input

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so when the player presses
enter then time is stored now because we have used

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the time function we can print the start and end times in the player's local time so the

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STR if time that stands for string from
time that can be used to format the

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local time tuple into a more readable
form according to a format string its

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pass to it so there is a table in the documentation will go and have a look at it shortly but why don't we give this program a bit of a run first to see

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what it actually does and we will talk about it more
press enter to start

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you can see what happened there it started
14:01:19 and finished to 14:01:20 so

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my reaction time is point 79 of a second
so just under a second so I'm not fully

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asleep let's try again a bit slower there and you can see I was .98 second at

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that time but you can see that seems to be working
and the local time can confirm that

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that is the right time if we click on
this and have a look

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Wednesday 2:01 p.m. as you can see so that is working so getting back to the documentation string

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for time let's go have a look at that
will search for strft click on that and you can see these various

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options and we used the %X in uppercase locale's
appropriate time representation so

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we just telling it this case that we only want
the time component out of the string effectively

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out of the date to be shown on the
screen so that's a basic example of this

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problems with this program though I'll show you one
quickly and then I'm going to end the

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video and will continue on the next one but
one of the first problems we got is I can press enter twice there

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and then wait for it to wake up and you can see
their my reaction time is points .0001580

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that's because I already pressed enter
twice and the computer accepted that

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enter in advance and that's why I was able
to do it so quickly so there's a problem

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with that in that I can cheat and also another
problem but we'll start talking about

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both of those issues and also how to correct those in the
next video