Timestamp in Python

Question

i have a bunch of xml files under a directory. I am trying to fetch some details out of the files such as some tag values and its last modified date and time like that. My script is

from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
import os, stat
import sys
import datetime

def shahul(dir):
    for r,d,f in os.walk(dir):
        for files in f:
            if files.endswith(".xml"):

                dom=parse(os.path.join(r, files))
                info=os.stat(os.path.join(r, files));
                atime=info.st_atime;
                ctime=info.st_ctime;
                mtime=info.st_mtime;
                name = dom.getElementsByTagName('rev')
                title = dom.getElementsByTagName('title')
                approved_by = dom.getElementsByTagName('approved-by')
                approved = approved_by[0].attributes['approved'].value
                print (files,
                       datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(atime),
                       datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ctime),
                       datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(mtime),
                       title[0].firstChild.nodeValue,
                       name[0].firstChild.nodeValue,
                       approved, sep='\t')

shahul("location")

Everything works fine. But the time is not valid. It shows same time for last creation time, modified time. Also in wrong format, i dont know why it is showing like this. I got the output like.

XXX.xml 05:49.2 05:49.2 05:49.2 File_name   E   yes
XXX.xml 22:14.6 22:14.6 22:14.6 File_name   F   yes
XXX.xml 29:15.5 29:15.5 29:15.5 File_name   E   yes
XXX.xml 16:02.1 16:02.1 16:02.1 File_name   F2  yes
XXX.xml 00:48.0 00:48.0 00:48.0 File_name   B1  yes

It seems not right. how to correct it?

Answer 1

st_ctime is not creation time, it is change time. You also may want to format the datetime objects using .isoformat or something similar.

This might shed some light on on atime, ctime, and mtime.