How to use strptime with milliseconds in Python

strptime() function in python converts the string into DateTime objects. The strptime() is a class method that takes two arguments : 

• string that should be converted to datetime object
• format string used to parse the string.

These two string arguments are mandatory for converting a string into DateTime object.

Syntax:

strptime(date_string, format_string)

List of Format codes:

Format string	Interpretation	Example
%a	Weekday as an abbreviated name.	Sun, Mon, …, Sat
%A	Weekday as full name.	Sunday, Monday, …, Saturday
%w	Weekday as a decimal number, 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday.	0, 1, …, 6
%d	Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number.	01, 02, …, 31
%b	Month as an abbreviated name.	Jan, Feb, …, Dec
%B	Month.	January, February, …, December
%m	Month	01, 02, …, 12
%y	Year without century.	00, 01, …, 99
%Y	Year with century.	0001, 0002, …, 2013, 2014, …, 9998, 9999
%H	Hour (24-hour clock).	00, 01, …, 23
%I	Hour (12-hour clock).	01, 02, …, 12
%p	either AM or PM.	AM, PM
%M	Minute.	00, 01, …, 59
%S	Second.	00, 01, …, 59
%f	Microsecond as a decimal number.	000000, 000001, …, 999999
%z	UTC offset in the form ±HHMM[SS[.ffffff]] .	+0000, -0400, +1030, +063415, -030712.345216
%Z	Time zone (UTC, GMT)
%j	Day of the year.	001, 002, …, 366
%U	Week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the week).	00, 01, …, 53
%W	Week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the week) as a decimal number.	00, 01, …, 53
%c	preferred date and time representation.	Tue Aug 16 21:30:00 1998
%x	preferred date representation.	08/16/88 08/16/1998
%X	preferred time representation.	21:30:00 %% – A literal ‘%’ character.

To use this function to produce milliseconds in python %f is used in format code.

Given below are some implementations.

Example 1: Time with milliseconds

Python3

from datetime import datetime

datetime_string = "15/06/2021 13:30:15.120"

print(type(datetime_string))

format = "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S.%f"

# converting datetime string to datetime
# object with milliseconds..
date_object = datetime.strptime(datetime_string, format)

print("date_object =", date_object)

# Type is datetime object
print(type(date_object))

Output:

<class 'str'>
date_object = 2021-06-15 13:30:15.120000
<class 'datetime.datetime'>

Example 2: time with milliseconds

Python3

from datetime import datetime

# Getting current datetime and converting
# it to string
date_str = str(datetime.now())

print(type(date_str))

print(datetime.strptime(date_str, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f'))

Output:

<class 'str'>
2021-08-01 15:27:59.979673

Example 3: time with milliseconds

Python3

from datetime import datetime

# Using strptime() with milliseconds

date_time = datetime.strptime(
    "17 Oct 2021 15:48:35.525001", "%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S.%f")

print(date_time)

Output:

2021-10-17 15:48:35.525001