Question

How can i get the current time in UTC time (Zulu style for hours and minutes: 0100Z) , and add it to a string so i can concatenate it

This gives me cannot concatenate string:

import datetime
utc_datetime = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
utc_datetime.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%MZ") //Result: '2011-12-12-0939Z'
filename = '/SomeDirectory/AnotherDirectory/FilePrefix_'+utc_datetime+'.txt'

And this gives me another string for the filename:

//returns: /SomeDirectory/AnotherDirectory/FilePrefix_2011-12-12 09:42:15.374022.txt

import datetime
utc_datetime = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
utc_datetime.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%MZ") //Result: '2011-12-12-0939Z'
filename = '/SomeDirectory/AnotherDirectory/FilePrefix_'+str(utc_datetime)+'.txt' 

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

What you want to do is probably :

import datetime
utc_datetime = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
formated_string = utc_datetime.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%MZ") //Result: '2011-12-12-0939Z'
filename = '/SomeDirectory/AnotherDirectory/FilePrefix_%s.txt'% formated_string

or in a one-liner way :

filename = '/SomeDirectory/AnotherDirectory/FilePrefix_%s.txt'%datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%MZ")

When using datetime.strftime it returns the string formatted as you need, it does not modify the datetime object.

EDIT : use %s instead of +, thanks Danilo Bargen