This lesson is a follow up to Unit 2: Strings and Console input and will give you practice with the concepts introduced in that lesson.

Date and Time

We've managed to print the date and time separately in a very pretty fashion. Let's combine the two!

```py
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()

print '%02d/%02d/%04d' % (now.month, now.day, now.year)
print '%02d:%02d:%02d' % (now.hour, now.minute, now.second)
```

The example above will print out the date, then on a separate line it will print the time.

Let's print them all on the same line in a single `print` statement!

Grand Finale

A lot of times you want to keep track of when something happened. We can do so in Python using `datetime`.

Here we'll use `datetime` to print the date and time in a nice format.

The datetime Library

Notice how the output looks like `2013-11-25 23:45:14.317454`. What if you don't want the entire date and time? 

```py
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()

current_year = now.year
current_month = now.month
current_day = now.day
```

You already have the first two lines.

In the third line, we take the year (and only the year) from the variable `now` and store it in `current_year`.

In the fourth and fifth lines, we store the month and day from `now`.

Extracting Information

Nice work! Let's do the same for the hour, minute, and second.

```py
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()

print now.hour
print now.minute
print now.second
```

In the above example, we just printed the current hour, then the current minute, then the current second.

We can again use the variable `now` to print the time.

Pretty Time

What if we want to print today's date in the following format? `mm/dd/yyyy`. Let's use string substitution again!

```py
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()

print '%02d-%02d-%04d' % (now.month, now.day, now.year)
# will print the current date as mm-dd-yyyy
```

Remember that the standalone `%` operator after the string will fill the `%02d` and `%04d` placeholders in the string on the left with the numbers and strings in the parentheses on the right.

`%02d` pads the month and day numbers with zeros to two places, and `%04d` pads the year to four places. This is one way dates are commonly displayed.

Hot Date

We can use a function called `datetime.now()` to retrieve the current date and time.

```py
from datetime import datetime

print datetime.now()
```

The first line imports the `datetime` library so that we can use it.

The second line will print out the current date and time.