Adding Nanoseconds To Datetime In Python

Python is a high-level, interpreted programming language, designed and developed by Guido van Rossum in the 1990s.

It is known for its simplicity and is one of the most popular programming languages present in the software industry.

One of the most important concepts in python is that of adding nanoseconds to a datetime in python.

Let us consider an example where we have an arbitrary starting datetime, say 30th of March in the year 2022, 11 hours and we need to add 2 nanoseconds to this datetime.

The resulting datetime should be the 30th of March in the year 2022, 11 hours and 2 nanoseconds.

Let us have a look at the different ways of doing this in detail.

Adding Nanosecond using the pandas library in Python

In this method, we use the pandas library to add nanoseconds to a datetime.

To work with these libraries we must first import them using the import statement.

We define a variable start_datetime that stores the starting datetime. The desired starting datetime in this example is 30th of March in the year 2022, 11 hours and we need to add 2 nanoseconds to this.

This is specified using the pandas.to_datetime() function with the parameter passed as the date in string format in the form 30/3/2022 11:00:00, i.e. day month year hours minutes seconds format.

Next, we add 2 nanoseconds to this starting datetime using the pandas.to_timedelta() function by passing the parameter as 2 and unit as ns to specify that we are mentioning nanoseconds.

The result is stored in the variable new_datetime which is later printed.

Let us look at the Python 3 code and corresponding output for this method:

# Importing the required libraries
import pandas as pd

# Starting datetime
start_datetime = pd.to_datetime('30/3/2022 11:00:00')

# Performing the operation
new_datetime = start_datetime + pd.to_timedelta(2, unit = 'ns')

# Printing
print(new_datetime)

Output

2022-03-30 11:00:00.000000002

Unfortunately, using the pandas library is the only way of working with date-time objects at a nanosecond level since the original date-time library can only work up to the millisecond level with the relativedelta() function and up to the microsecond level with the timedelta() function.

Conclusion

In this topic, we have learned the use and advantages of adding nanoseconds to a datetime in a Python program, following some simple running examples of programs, thus giving us an intuition of how this concept could be applied in the real-world situations. Feel free to reach out to info.javaexercise@gmail.com in case of any suggestions.