Arrow - Better dates & times for Python

Documentation: crsmithdev.com/arrow

What?

Arrow is a Python library that offers a sensible, human-friendly approach to creating, manipulating, formatting and converting dates, times, and timestamps. It implements and updates the datetime type, plugging gaps in functionality, and provides an intelligent module API that supports many common creation scenarios. Simply put, it helps you work with dates and times with fewer imports and a lot less code.

Arrow is heavily inspired by moment.js and requests.

Why?

Python's standard library and some other low-level modules have near-complete date, time and time zone functionality but don't work very well from a usability perspective:

• Too many modules: datetime, time, calendar, dateutil, pytz and more
• Too many types: date, time, datetime, tzinfo, timedelta, relativedelta, etc.
• Time zones and timestamp conversions are verbose and unpleasant
• Time zone naievety is the norm
• Gaps in functionality: ISO-8601 parsing, timespans, humanization

Features

• Fully implemented, drop-in replacement for datetime
• Supports Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.3
• Time zone-aware & UTC by default
• Provides super-simple creation options for many common input scenarios
• Updated .replace method with support for relative offsets, including weeks
• Formats and parses strings, including ISO-8601-formatted strings automatically
• Timezone conversion
• Timestamp available as a property
• Generates time spans, ranges, floors and ceilings in timeframes from year to microsecond
• Humanizes and supports a growing list of contributed locales
• Extensible for your own Arrow-derived types

Quick start

First:

$ pip install arrow

And then:

>>> import arrow
>>> utc = arrow.utcnow()
>>> utc
<Arrow [2013-05-11T21:23:58.970460+00:00]>

>>> utc = utc.replace(hours=-1)
>>> utc
<Arrow [2013-05-11T20:23:58.970460+00:00]>

>>> local = utc.to('US/Pacific')
>>> local
<Arrow [2013-05-11T13:23:58.970460-07:00]>

>>> arrow.get('2013-05-11T21:23:58.970460+00:00')
<Arrow [2013-05-11T21:23:58.970460+00:00]>

>>> local.timestamp
1368303838

>>> local.format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss ZZ')
'2013-05-11 13:23:58 -07:00'

>>> local.humanize()
'an hour ago'

>>> local.humanize(locale='ko_kr')
'1시간 전'

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, especially with localization. See locales.py for what's currently supported.