I’m adding UTC time strings to Bitbucket API responses that currently only contain Amsterdam (!) time strings. For consistency with the UTC time strings returned elsewhere, the desired format is 2011-11-03 11:07:04 (followed by +00:00, but that’s not germane).

What’s the best way to create such a string (without a microsecond component) from a datetime instance with a microsecond component?

>>> import datetime
>>> print unicode(datetime.datetime.now())
2011-11-03 11:13:39.278026

I’ll add the best option that’s occurred to me as a possible answer, but there may well be a more elegant solution.

Edit: I should mention that I’m not actually printing the current time – I used datetime.now to provide a quick example. So the solution should not assume that any datetime instances it receives will include microsecond components.

16 s
16

If you want to format a datetime object in a specific format that is different from the standard format, it’s best to explicitly specify that format:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
'2011-11-03 18:21:26'

See the documentation of datetime.strftime() for an explanation of the % directives.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *