cftime

Time-handling functionality from netcdf4-python

News

For details on the latest updates, see the Changelog.

9/15/2026: Version 1.6.6 release. Limited API compliant wheels (should work with python 3.15). New cftime calendar "tai".

10/13/2025: Version 1.6.5 release. Minor bugfixes/optimizations, wheels for python 3.14, no more wheels for 3.8/3.9.

6/7/2024: Version 1.6.4 release. Wheels for muslinux and aarch64, numpy 2.0 compatibility.

10/20/2023: Version 1.6.3 released. Support for python 3.12, cython 3.0, strptime formats without separators.

9/18/2022: Version 1.6.2 released. strptime method added, fix for num2date failure on empty integer array, date2num 'longdouble' keyword added. New wheel building workflow.

6/30/2022: Version 1.6.1 released. Fixes for numpy 1.23.0, updated CI/CD.

3/4/2022: Version 1.6.0 released. Big speed-ups for num2date, date2index bugfix for select != 'exact' when select='exact' works, fix for date2num with masked array inputs.

1/22/2022: Version 1.5.2 released (wheels for Apple M1 available on pypi for python 3.8,3.9 and 3.10). is_leap_year function added (issue #259).

10/31/2021: Version 1.5.1.1 released (new binary wheels for python 3.10).

10/1/2021: Version 1.5.1 released. Changed default behavior of proleptic_gregorian to has_year_zero=T (since it is allowed in ISO-8601 and CF does not specify the year zero convention for this calendar). Raise warning message when trying to create a calendar that is not supported by CF version 1.9 (no years < 1 allowed for 'standard'/'gregorian' or 'julian' calendars). Added support for "common_year" and "common_years" units for "noleap" and "365_day" calendars.

5/20/2021: Version 1.5.0 released. Includes support for astronomical year numbering (including the year zero) for real-world calendars ('julian', 'gregorian'/'standard', and 'proleptic_gregorian') using 'has_year_zero' cftime.datetime kwarg. Added a 'change_calendar' cftime.datetime method to switch to another 'real-world' calendar to enable comparison of instances with different calendars. Some legacy classes and functions removed (utime, JulianDayFromDate and DateFromJulianDay). The functionality of JulianDayFromDate and DateFromJulianDay is now available from the methods cftime.datetime.toordinal and cftime.datetime.fromordinal.

2/2/2021: Version 1.4.1 released. Restore use of calendar-specific subclasses in cftime.num2date, cftime.datetime.__add__, and cftime.datetime.__sub__. The use of this will be removed in a later release. Add 'fromordinal' static method to create a cftime.datetime instance from a julian day ordinal and calendar (inverse of 'toordinal').

2/1/2021: Version 1.4.0 released. License changed to MIT (GPL'ed code replaced). Roundtrip accuracy improved for units other than microseconds. Added cftime.datetime.toordinal method, returns integer julian day number.

1/17/2021: Version 1.3.1 released.

11/16/2020: Version 1.3.0 released. API change: The cftime.datetime constructor now creates 'calendar-aware' instances (default is 'standard' calendar, if calendar='' or None the instance is not calendar aware and some methods, like dayofwk, dayofyr, __add__ and __sub__, will not work) See discussion for issue #198. The calendar specific sub-classes are now deprecated, but remain for now as stubs that just instantiate the base class and override __repr__. The default calendar in cftime.date2num has been changed from 'standard' to None (the calendar associated with first input datetime object is used to define the calendar).

07/20/2020: Version 1.2.1 released. Fixes a couple of regressions introduced in 1.2.0. See Changelog for details.

7/06/2020: version 1.2.0 released. New microsecond accurate algorithm for date2num/num2date contributed by spencerkclark. Bugs fixed in masked array handling.

5/12/2020: version 1.1.3 released. Add isoformat method for compatibility with python datetime (issue #152). Make 'standard' default calendar for cftime.datetime so that dayofwk,dayofyr methods don't fail (issue #169).

4/20/2020: version 1.1.2 released. Code optimization, fix logic so only_use_cftime_datetimes=False works as expected (issues #158 and #165).

3/16/2020: version 1.1.1 released. Fix bug in microsecond formatting, ensure identical num2date results if input is an array of times, or a single scalar (issue #143).

2/12/2020: version 1.1.0 released. cftime.datetime instances are returned by default from num2date (instead of returning python datetime instances where possible (issue #136)). num2pydate convenience function added (always returns python datetime instances, issue #134). Fix for fraction seconds in reference date string (issue #140). Added daysinmonth attribute (issue #137).

10/25/2019: version 1.0.4.2 released (fix for issue #126).

10/21/2019: version 1.0.4 released.

12/05/2018: version 1.0.3.4 released (just to fix a problem with the source tarball on pypi).

12/05/2018: version 1.0.3.1 released. Bugfix release (fixed issue with installation when cython not installed, regression on 32-bit platforms, workaround for pandas compatibility).

12/01/2018: version 1.0.3 released. Test coverage with coveralls.io, improved round-tripping accuracy for non-real world calendars (like 360_day).

10/27/2018: version 1.0.2 released. Improved accuracy (from approximately 1000 microseconds to 10 microseconds on x86 platforms). Refactored calendar calculations now allow for negative reference years. num2date function now more than an order of magnitude faster. months since units now allowed, but only for 360_day calendar.

08/15/2018: version 1.0.1 released.

11/8/2016: cftime was split out of the netcdf4-python package.

Quick Start

• Clone GitHub repository (git clone https://github.com/Unidata/cftime.git), or get source tarball from PyPI. Links to Windows and OS X precompiled binary packages are also available on PyPI.

• Make sure numpy and Cython are installed and you have Python 2.7 or newer.

• Run python setup.py build, then python setup.py install (with sudo if necessary).

• To run all the tests, execute py.test.

Documentation

See the online docs for more details.