Why does the strptime method from the datetime module add the year, month, and day if the format string doesn't have them?

Question

Python

Hello. There is such a code

from datetime import datetime

    print(datetime.strptime('23:14:44', '%H:%M:%S'))

the output will be: datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 23, 14, 44). Question: where did the year, month and day come from, if this was not in the specified format and how to remove them from the output?

Answer 1

The datetime object always has a year and everything else, by design. If they are not needed, you just need to format the output without them explicitly.

Answer 2

You are using a "date-time" object, which means that your output must have a date and must have a time. And since no date was found in the input data, the default date is substituted.
To return a time object, you need to extract it from a datetime:

print(datetime.strptime('23:14:44', '%H:%M:%S').time())