Constructing dates and times

In order to construct new date/time objects representing the current date or time, Julia provides two helper functions, now and today. Let's look at some examples in the read-eval-print loop (REPL):

julia> using Dates 
 
julia> d = today() 
2018-11-08 

julia> typeof(d) 
Date 

julia> dt = now() 
2018-11-08T16:33:34.868 

julia> dt |> typeof 
DateTime  

julia> t = Dates.Time(now()) 
16:34:13.065 

julia> typeof(t) 
Time

The now function can also accept an additional argument to return the UTC time (without local adjustments for daylight savings):

julia> now(UTC) 
2018-11-08T15:35:08.776

Internally, all the types wrap an Int64 value that can be accessed through the instant field:

julia> dt.instant 
Dates.UTInstant{Millisecond}(63677378014868 milliseconds) 

julia> t.instant 
75147529000000 nanoseconds 

julia> d.instant 
Dates.UTInstant{Day}(737006 days)

The instant property of the objects reflects the precision level of each type...