datetime.time in a tuple shows datetime.datetime instead value

Question

in the below code snippet, I use a loop to append missing hours in a list of tuples

hours = []

for i in range(24):
    hours.append(dt.time(i, 0))

for an hour in hours: # this loop prints in the str format "HH:MM: SS"
    print(hour)

for hour in hours:
    check = True
    for row in rows:
        if row[0] == hour:
            check = False
            break
    if check == True:
        rows.append((hour, None, None))

for row in rows: # This loop prints datetime.time(H,0)
    print(row)

The problem is that when printing DateTime. time object in the tuple (second loop) the output is:

datetime.time(H,0)

However when the datetime.time is in a list (first loop) it prints in the correct format:

"HH:MM: SS"

How can I insert datetime. time with the second format in a tuple?

Answer 1

What you are seeing is the difference between str and repr in Python. The first loop is printing the datetime object as a str. The second loop is outputting as a repr, a type of string representation in Python that is mainly used for debugging.

You can use the str() function to force the datetime object to print as a string, like this:

for tup in rows:
    print(str(tup[0]), tup[1], tup[2])