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In the previous lesson, we saw how we could create a pixel.

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But one of the things that would be nice is instead of having to type this

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manually,

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I would really like to be able to create that using the date-time module.

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I can import my datetime, so from datetime module,

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I'm going to import the datetime class.

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And now I can use it to get today's date by tapping into datetime.now.

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But if I print this out,

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you can see that this is clearly not going to be in the format that I need it to

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be.

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So I'm gonna comment out my request and I'm going to take a look at what my data

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looks like. This contains the date and time,

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and it's in a different format.

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So whenever we're encounter a new API or a new service,

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they often want the date and time in a different format. For example, in Asia,

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the year tends to come first, in the US or in the UK,

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the year tend to come at the end.

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How can we format the Python date to any format we need? Well,

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there is a really useful method called the strftime method.

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And this allows us to pass in a string that will a format

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the date that we get back from datetime into any format we need.

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For example,

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if we pass in %a then we'll get the short version of the week-

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day. If we pass in a %b,

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then we'll get the full name of the month and so on and so forth.

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So we can use this table to actually create the exact date format we need.

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Let's go ahead and take this today and let's go ahead and use the strftime

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and we're going to pass in a string. Now,

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the first string we need is the year in the full version.

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So this is going to be %Y and it's a capital Y.

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Now, if you need a dash, then you can add a dash. If you need a space,

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you can add a space. But in my case, I actually wanted it all together.

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So the next thing I want is the month as a number.

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So that's %m

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and then it's %d to get the day of the month.

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Now, if I actually print this out,

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you can see that this is formatted in the exact format I need.

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And if I wanna add in a, I dunno,

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asterix there then it'll format it like that.

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If I want to change the date to a word like Wednesday or December,

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then I can simply change that format string.

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Now that we've managed to do this, then we can get our date

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time programmatically using the datetime.now method.

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We can also use it to create any datetime of our choosing.

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So lets say I wanted a backtrack to create a pixel for yesterday.

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Well then I can simply create my datetime by specifying the year,

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the month and the day.

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So today's 24th.

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So yesterday was 23rd and then it's going to take that date and it's going to

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format it into the correct format and then post a quantity.

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So let's say that yesterday I cycled,

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I did cycle a bit more actually, let's say it was 15 kilometers.

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Now if I go ahead and uncomment this and run it again,

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it's gonna post the latest piece of data to pixela and

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if we now update our graph,

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you can see I've now got two pixels and this one is a lot heavier in terms of

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color to show that I cycled a lot further than today.

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And we've now got a total kilometer, a max, a min,

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an average and the total number of pixels.

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The last thing I want to show you before we finish off with this project is how

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we can update and delete pixels using the put and delete requests.

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That's what we're going to do in the next lesson.