How can I extract Last Modified Date in MS Azure for a blob in my blob storage

Question

I am pretty new to the world of MS Azure. I am trying to get the filenames and the last modified date for a bunch of files (block blobs) kept in my blob storage using Python. Here is the code that I am using:

import datetime
from azure.storage.blob import BlockBlobService
blob_service = BlockBlobService(account_name=account, account_key=acckey,protocol='http', request_session=sess)
blob_service.get_blob_to_path(container, pdfname, pdflocal)
generator = blob_service.list_blobs(container)
filenames = []
for blob in generator:
    print (blob.name)
    pdflocal = './' + blob.name
    properties=blob_service.get_blob_to_path(container, blob.name,pdflocal)
    date_year = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.path.getmtime("./"+blob.name) ).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
    print (date_year)
    filenames.append(blob.name)
print len(filenames)

The problem here is, that the code tries to create a copy of my files and hence the last modified date is updated to the current date and time. How can I access the actual last modified date and time in Azure ML Studio?

I read about Blob.Properties.LastModified but it doesn't seem to work in python. One of the confusing things here was about converting the blobs in CloudBlobs. I am not sure if this has to be done within the Python script because the blobs in the Storage Explorer are of three types: Block, Page and Append. Am I missing something here?

Poet

Hi, I suggest you open your issue on github.com/Azure/azure-storage-python/issues for maximum visibility. Don't forget to post your issue number here please, for other people. – Burned

Have you been successful in extracting the zip file in the blob. if yes can you share the snippet for the same. – Ulmer

Answer 1

It sounds like that you want to get the last_modified property of a blob on Azure using Python in Azure ML Studio. Please try to use the code below.

for blob in generator:
    last_modified = blob.properties.last_modified
    print(last_modified)

And you can try to code <object>.__dict__ in Python interactive env to show the properties of a Python object if you are not sure what property whether or not exists, for example as below.

# Show the properties of a Blob object
>>> blob.__dict__
{'content': '', 'metadata': {}, 'snapshot': None, 'name': 'test.tmp',
 'properties': <azure.storage.blob.models.BlobProperties object at 0x7f4f8f870110>}
# Show the properties of the BlobProperties Object
>>> blob.properties.__dict__
{'content_length': 99831, 'blob_type': 'BlockBlob', 'append_blob_committed_block_count': None, 
 'last_modified': datetime.datetime(2016, 11, 23, 5, 46, 10, tzinfo=tzutc()), 'content_range': None, 'etag': '"0x8D4136407173436"', 'page_blob_sequence_number': None, 'content_settings': <azure.storage.blob.models.ContentSettings object at 0x7f4f8f870510>, 'copy': <azure.storage.blob.models.CopyProperties object at 0x7f4f8f870650>, 'lease': <azure.storage.blob.models.LeaseProperties object at 0x7f4f8f870810>}

Standford

Thanks Peter. This worked perfectly well. I think the issue was that I was not writing 'properties' in the correct case and referring the last_modified in an incorrect manner. – Poet

in blob we have two modified date, last modified date, and access tier last modified date. which one this code returns? – Dyak