Question

I have a datetime object, for which I want to create a date string according to the OS locale settings (as specified e.g. in Windows’7 region and language settings).

Following Python’s datetime formatting documentation, I used the %x format code which is supposed to output “Locale’s appropriate date representation.“. I expect this “representation” to be either Windows “short date” or “Long date” format, but it isn’t either one.
(I have the short date format set to d/MM/yyyy and the long date format to dddd d MMMM yyyy, but the output is dd/MM/yy)

What’s wrong here: the Python documentation, the Python implementation, or my expectation ?
(and how to fix?)

Answer 1

After reading the setlocale() documentation, I understood that the default OS locale is not used by Python as the default locale. To use it, I had to start my module with:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')

Alternatively, if you intend to only reset the locale’s time settings, use just LC_TIME as it breaks many fewer things:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, '')

Surely there will be a valid reason for this, but at least this could have been mentioned as a remark in the Python documentation for the %x directive.