Creating a simple clock in python

In this code example we will create a simple clock. There will be a console based example and a simple gui version as well.

We will use the datetime module which provides classes for manipulating dates and times.

We will use the strftime() which has a method for formatting date objects into easily readable strings, it takes one parameter, which is a format code which is used to specify the format of the returned string.

We will use the following format codes, there are many others available.

%H Hour 00-23
%p AM/PM
%M Minute 00-59
%S Second 00-59

Command line example

#!/usr/bin/env python
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import datetime
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now = datetime.datetime.now()
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print (now.strftime("%H:%M:%S %p"))

If you run this example you will see something like this. This shows several runs.

Gui Example

Now we will create a gui example, for this we will use tkinter

#!/usr/bin/env python

import tkinter
# retrieve the system time 
from time import strftime

top = tkinter.Tk()
#title of the App
top.title('Digital Clock')
#restric the resizable of the gui window
top.resizable(0,0)

def time(): 
string = strftime('%H:%M:%S %p') 
clock.config(text = string) 
clock.after(1000, time)

#black background with yellow text
clock = tkinter.Label(top, font = ('arial', 40, 'bold'), background = 'black', foreground = 'yellow')
clock.pack(anchor = 'center')
time()

top.mainloop()

If you run this example you will see a gui that looks something like this