Get "2:35pm" instead of "02:35PM" from Python date/time?

Question

I'm still a bit slow with Python, so I haven't got this figured out beyond what's obviously in the docs, etc.

I've worked with Django a bit, where they've added some datetime formatting options via template tags, but in regular python code how can I get the 12-hour hour without a leading zero?

Is there a straightforward way to do this? I'm looking at the 2.5 and 2.6 docs for "strftime()" and there doesn't seem to be a formatting option there for this case.

Should I be using something else?

Feel free to include any other time-formatting tips that aren't obvious from the docs. =)

Answer 1

I know it's pretty cheap, but you could just discard the first character if it's a zero :)

Answer 2

Nothing built-in to datetime will do it. You'll need to use something like:

datetime.time(1).strftime('%I:%M%p').lstrip('0')

Answer 3

datetime.time objects expose the hour, minute and second fields. Making your own formatting with these is pretty trivial. Something like this:

return "%d:%02d %s" % (foo.hour % 12 + 0 if foo.hour % 12 else 12, #ugh
                       foo.minute,
                       "pm" if foo.hour >= 12 else "am")

Answer 4

Use %l to get the hour as a number between 1..12:

In [2]: datetime.time(hour=14,minute=35).strftime('%l:%M%p')
Out[2]: ' 2:35PM'

For more format codes, see http://au2.php.net/strftime.

Answer 5

While I'm partial to Mike DeSimone's answer, for voting purposes I think this might be a worthwhile contribution...

The Django project contains a "PHP Compatible" date formatting class in django/utils/dateformat.py (trunk). It's used like so (shell example):

>>> import datetime
>>> from django.utils.dateformat import DateFormat
>>> d = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> df =  DateFormat(d)
>>> df.format('g:ia') # Format for Hour-no-leading-0, minutes, lowercase 'AM/PM'
u'9:10a.m.'

It fulfills the requirement here, and may be worth including in your project. With that, I'll say that you should verify the license permits such use... Any comments to clarify are welcome.