How to Solve Python AttributeError: module ‘datetime’ has no attribute ‘today’

This error occurs when you import the datetime module and try to call the today() method on the imported module. You can solve this error by importing the datetime class using:

from datetime import datetime

or accessing the class method using:

datetime.datetime.today()

We can also use access the date class which also has the today method and returns the current local date using

from datetime import date

or

datetime.date.today()

This tutorial will go through the error and how to solve it with code examples.

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AttributeError: module ‘datetime’ has no attribute ‘today’

AttributeError occurs in a Python program when we try to access an attribute (method or property) that does not exist for a particular object. datetime is a built-in Python module that supplies classes for manipulating dates and times. One of the classes in datetime is called datetime. It can be unclear when both the module and one of the classes share the same name. If you use the import syntax:

import datetime

You are importing the datetime module, not the datetime class. We can verify that we are importing the module using the type() function:

import datetime

print(type(datetime))

<class 'module'>

We can check what names are under datetime using dir() as follows:

import datetime

attributes = dir(datetime)

print('today' in attributes)

In the above code, we assign the list of attributes returned by dir() to the variable name attributes. We can then check for the today() attribute in the list using the in operator. When we run this code, we see it returns False.

False

However, if we import the datetime class using the from keyword and call dir(), we will see today as an attribute of the class. We can check for today in the list of attributes as follows:

from datetime import datetime

attributes = dir(datetime)

print('today' in attributes)

True

Example

Consider the following example where we want to get today’s date.

import datetime

today = datetime.today()

print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

Let’s run the code to see what happens:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
Input In [10], in <cell line: 3>()
      1 import datetime
----> 3 today = datetime.today()
      5 print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

AttributeError: module 'datetime' has no attribute 'today'

The error occurs because we imported the datetime module and tried to call the today() method on the module, but today() is an attribute of the datetime class, not the module.

Solution #1: Use the from keyword

We can solve this error by importing the datetime class using the from keyword. Let’s look at the revised code:

from datetime import datetime

today = datetime.today()

print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

Let’s run the code to see the result:

Today's date is: 2022-05-20 13:42:31.547282

datetime.today() returns the local datetime. We can also call date.today(), which requires us to import the date class from the datetime module. Let’s look at the revised code:

from datetime import date

today = date.today()

print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

Let’s run the code to see the result:

Today's date is: 2022-05-20

date.today() returns the current local date.

Solution #2: Use datetime.datetime

We can also solve this error by importing the module and then accessing the datetime class using datetime.datetime, then calling the today() method. Let’s look at the revised code:

import datetime

today = datetime.datetime.today()

print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

Today's date is: 2022-05-20 13:43:36.295961

Similarly, we can access the date class using datetime.date, and then call the today() method:

import datetime

today = datetime.date.today()

print(f"Today's date is: {today}")

Today's date is: 2022-05-20

Summary

Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial! Remember that from datetime import datetime imports the datetime class and import datetime imports the datetime module.

For further reading on AttributeErrors involve the datetime module, go to the article:

How to Solve Python AttributeError: module ‘datetime’ has no attribute ‘utcnow’

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