Date formats

[Michael P. Reilly]

mike milliger <milliger at ausinfo.com> wrote:
: I read the documentation in the Python Reference Library (6.3) on time
: access and conversions and chapter 8 in programming python, yet I can't
: figure out if i need ( or how to use) a tuple to format the return from
: localtime().  i get a string now (wed jun 10 1999 xx:xx:xx) but i need
: to format it to yyyymmdd_hhmmss.  Is there any switch ( %) or function
: that can be useful?  Any help is appreciated.

"Here strftime comes to save the day!"  (Okay, I won't do my bad
impressions of Andy Kaufman anymore.)

The time module has a handy function called strftime, which works like
format strings, but on the time tuple.

  my_date = time.strftime("%Y%m%d_%H%M%S", time.localtime(time.time()))
  print my_date
19990610_145144

Or you can look at the less-standard, more versatile mxDateTime package
(http://starship.python.net/~lemburg/mxExtensions.html).

  -Arcege