Question

A user is specifying an hour and minute in my interface. I’d like to attach the current date to a datetime object in Python.

First I tried this:

a = datetime.strptime("8:30pm", "%I:%M%p")
print a

But this yields:

1900-01-01 20:30:00

Then I tried:

b = date.today()
a = datetime.strptime(str(b.year) + "-" + str(b.month) + "-"
                      + str(b.day) + " 8:30pm", "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M%p")

This works, but it’s ugly; surely there is a better way?

Answer 1

Yes, use datetime.datetime.combine:

import datetime
a = datetime.datetime.strptime("8:30pm", "%I:%M%p")
today = datetime.datetime.today()

result = datetime.datetime.combine(today.date(), a.time())

# result == datetime.datetime(2011, 12, 25, 20, 30)