Question

I am trying to use datetime module. I need the month to come back as a INT with the ZERO in front. in the form as 01 for JAN, 02 for FEB etc etc. I can get 1 by using,

 today = date.today()
 m = today.month

I can get the correct format but not as an INT this way.

 today.strftime("%m")

is there a simple way to get the desired format I need. I have looked in the reference and I am sure I am missing it, but could someone help.

Answer 1

'{:%m}'.format(datetime.datetime.now())

seems to work.

Of course, you could take the less direct approach:

'{:02d}'.format(datetime.datetime.now().month)

Or you could use old style string interpolation:

'%02d' % (datetime.datetime.now().month)

but I like the first one because I think it’s cool …

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Finally, I don’t see what is wrong with .strftime … even though you said you tried it, it works just fine for me:

datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%m')

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What it seems like you’re looking for is a special subclass of int which knows how to “represent” itself when it printed:

 class MyInt(int):
     def __str__(self):
         return '%02d' % self

 a = MyInt(3)
 print (a)

However, I would definitely not recommend using this approach, instead I would recommend using string formatting or string interpolation as I’ve done above on the integer objects when you need to represent the integers as strings.