A bit of context before we jump into the code: As I'm finishing a blog post, I include the current date and time in the markdown file's YAML data. The one special thing about that is how it's in ISO 8601 format, which is done so that I can alter the data when it gets processed through Eleventy, the static site generator I use to make this site. When I first started properly timestamping, I created a small little Python script that got the current time and copied it into my computer's clipboard in the format I needed. Now that I'm doing my writing within Obsidian, that little script I made has been made redundant with templates and their date time formatting options. There's still quite a bit going on in this tiny script, though, so I figured I'd give it a moment to shine before I retired it.
The Script
This script requires the following pip packages: python-dateutil, pyperclip
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import tz
import pyperclip
current = datetime.now(tz.gettz('America/Edmonton'))
pyperclip.copy(current.isoformat())The Breakdown
At it's core, this script is based around Python's datetime Module; specifically the datetime submodule. From that submodule, only two functions will be used: .now() to get the current time according to the system clock and .isoformat() to convert the datetime.datetime object into a string that's in ISO 8601 format.
from datetime import datetime
current = datetime.now()
print(current.isoformat())Functionally the script is complete, but there are still some quality of life things can could be included, such as timezones and clipboard copying. That's where our previously mentioned pip packages come into play.
python-dateutil extends the functionality of the built-in datetime module significantly, but we're going to use for its .tz submodule. This submodule includes a handful of timezone related tools, all of which operate around the datetime.tzinfo object type. This type can be passed to datetime.now() for it to include timezone information alongside the current time. We'll use the .tz submodule's .gettz() function to handle any timezone data for us.
While the code so far has shown .gettz() being given a string that corresponds to a designated IANA tz database key, it's worth noting that the function doesn't need an input in order to work. Left at its default values, .gettz() will use the timezone information of the local time instead.
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import tz
current = datetime.now(tz.gettz('America/Edmonton'))
print(current.isoformat())Finally, we include pyperclip to add copy/paste functionallity to the script, allowing for the formatted time to be copied into our computer's clipboard.
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import tz
import pyperclip
current = datetime.now(tz.gettz('America/Edmonton'))
pyperclip.copy(current.isoformat())And there you have it! It's nothing too big, but I found it was definately handy for how I was writing my posts initially. Now that I'm using a program that has similar functionality built in, however, this little script of mine could be considered redundant. Heck, with Eleventy's recent inclusion of git Created as an input for date values, even bothering with a ISO 8601 string in the first place might be a bit redundant. 😅