Populate field with current time

Question

I am trying to populate a field with the current time. Here is what I tried that did not work:

Start editing
Open Attribute Table
Add Field -> Name: time
    Type: Date
Right Click on Field Name (time)
    Open FieldCalculator
        Parser: Python
        Type: Date

Then I basically tried all of these expressions:

time.strftime('%d/%m/%Y')

That gives me the date, not the time

datetime.datetime.now( )

That gave me DATE and TIME. But as soon as I saved the changes, the time disappears.

(If the time would stay there I could do something with the FieldCalculator to populate another column like !time![:x])

datetime.timedelta(seconds=0)

That gave me <Null>.

Am I missing a step or something?

Answer 1

The date field stores the full date. It is your system (combined with the type of database) that defines how a date will be displayed.

if you want to store a string with the time using your own format, you can use a text field, then something like

str(datetime.datetime.now( )).split()[1]

will work, or, better, directly use the date formatting from strftime. In your case, H for hours and M for minutes, optionnally S for seconds

time.strftime('%H:%M')

or

time.strftime('%H:%M.%S')

Note that an