Python strftime - date without leading 0?

Solution 1:

Actually I had the same problem and I realized that, if you add a hyphen between the % and the letter, you can remove the leading zero.

For example %Y/%-m/%-d.

This only works on Unix (Linux, OS X), not Windows (including Cygwin). On Windows, you would use #, e.g. %Y/%#m/%#d.

Solution 2:

We can do this sort of thing with the advent of the format method since python2.6:

>>> import datetime
>>> '{dt.year}/{dt.month}/{dt.day}'.format(dt = datetime.datetime.now())
'2013/4/19'

Though perhaps beyond the scope of the original question, for more interesting formats, you can do stuff like:

>>> '{dt:%A} {dt:%B} {dt.day}, {dt.year}'.format(dt=datetime.datetime.now())
'Wednesday December 3, 2014'

And as of python3.6, this can be expressed as an inline formatted string:

Python 3.6.0a2 (v3.6.0a2:378893423552, Jun 13 2016, 14:44:21) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import datetime
>>> dt = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> f'{dt:%A} {dt:%B} {dt.day}, {dt.year}'
'Monday August 29, 2016'

Solution 3:

Some platforms may support width and precision specification between % and the letter (such as 'd' for day of month), according to http://docs.python.org/library/time.html -- but it's definitely a non-portable solution (e.g. doesn't work on my Mac;-). Maybe you can use a string replace (or RE, for really nasty format) after the strftime to remedy that? e.g.:

>>> y
(2009, 5, 7, 17, 17, 17, 3, 127, 1)
>>> time.strftime('%Y %m %d', y)
'2009 05 07'
>>> time.strftime('%Y %m %d', y).replace(' 0', ' ')
'2009 5 7'

Solution 4:

>>> import datetime
>>> d = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> d.strftime('X%d/X%m/%Y').replace('X0','X').replace('X','')
'5/5/2011'

Solution 5:

Here is the documentation of the modifiers supported by strftime() in the GNU C library. (Like people said before, it might not be portable.) Of interest to you might be: