How To Make Pythons Datetime Object Show Am And Pm In Lowercase?

Over here: https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior it says that %p displays AM / PM. It shows this AM, PM (en_US); am, pm (de_DE) I'm not su

Solution 1:

Try changing '%p' to '%P'. Whether '%P' is supported depends on the 'strftime' function provided by the platform C library.

Solution 2:

I'm pretty sure that you cannot. The %p format code is the locale-specific "national representation of either "ante meridiem" (a.m.) or "post meridiem" (p.m.) as appropriate". de_DE is the generic German locale which is what defines the national representation which happens to be lowercase. The en_US locale has it defined in uppercase. Part of using functions like strftime is that they take care of the localization details for you.

The documentation does explicitly mention that the exact values are entirely locale specific:

Because the format depends on the current locale, care should be taken when making assumptions about the output value. Field orderings will vary (for example, “month/day/year” versus “day/month/year”), and the output may contain Unicode characters encoded using the locale’s default encoding (for example, if the current locale is ja_JP, the default encoding could be any one of eucJP, SJIS, or utf-8; use locale.getlocale() to determine the current locale’s encoding).

Solution 3:

From the documentation you've linked:

Because the format depends on the current locale, care should be taken when making assumptions about the output value. Field orderings will vary (for example, “month/day/year” versus “day/month/year”), and the output may contain Unicode characters encoded using the locale’s default encoding (for example, if the current locale is js_JP, the default encoding could be any one of eucJP, SJIS, or utf-8; use locale.getlocale() to determine the current locale’s encoding).

So, I don't think you can do it with a simple formatting option without overriding locale settings which may irritate users if you end up overwriting their locale settings.

Two suggestions:

• Use another formatting lib like Django's DateFormat ('a' will give you lowercase am/pm)
• If you're using Linux that uses glibc then you can use "%P" as Python's strftime() is backended by C-lib's strftime()

Solution 4:

en_US and de_DE are locales.

en_US = English US de_DE = German Germany

In the en_US locale, AM/PM are uppercase whereas for the de_DE locale, it's shown in lower case.

You can use locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE') to change your locale when you use time formatting and then revert it back after.

And to avoid issues with other date fields showing in the wrong order, like 'day,month,year' instead of the US-preferred 'month,day,year', when you use the time formatting options, make sure you specify all the fields and not one of the standard short/long time formats, since those will always be as per the locale. Example, %x:

%x    Locale’s appropriate date representation.    08/16/88 (None);
                                                   08/16/1988 (en_US);
                                                   16.08.1988 (de_DE)

However, doing this is not a good idea, since the month (for example) will appear in that language's name. So 'May' will appear as 'Mei' (affects both long and short forms).

A dirty workaround is to do a search and replace after the generating the timestring:

>>> datetime.strftime(datetime.today(), '%c %p').replace('AM', 'am').replace('PM', 'pm')
'08/10/16 10:37:49 am'>>> datetime.strftime(datetime.today(), '%c %p').replace(' AM', ' am').replace(' PM', ' pm')
'08/10/16 10:39:19 am'

Again, not recommended since that will interfere with the timezone part where 'AM' and 'PM' occur - 'AMT', 'PMDT', 'GAMT'. If you're not displaying that or any other alphabets like for month, then it should be okay.

Solution 5:

Another option, albeit kinda klunky, is to store only the "AM/PM" portion of the timestamp to another variable, then simply do:

my_ampm = now.strftime("%p").lower()