Question

I need to find out how to format numbers as strings. My code is here:

return str(hours)+':'+str(minutes)+':'+str(seconds)+' '+ampm 

Hours and minutes are integers, and seconds is a float. the str() function will convert all of these numbers to the tenths (0.1) place. So instead of my string outputting ‘5:30:59.07 pm’, it would display something like ‘5.0:30.0:59.1 pm’.

Bottom line, what library / function do I need to do this for me?

Answer 1

Starting with Python 3.6, formatting in Python can be done using formatted string literals or f-strings:

hours, minutes, seconds = 6, 56, 33 f'{hours:02}:{minutes:02}:{seconds:02} {'pm' if hours > 12 else 'am'}' 

or the str.format function starting with 2.7:

'{:02}:{:02}:{:02} {}'.format(hours, minutes, seconds, 'pm' if hours > 12 else 'am') 

or the string formatting % operator for even older versions of Python, but see the note in the docs:

'%02d:%02d:%02d' % (hours, minutes, seconds) 

And for your specific case of formatting time, there’s time.strftime:

import time  t = (0, 0, 0, hours, minutes, seconds, 0, 0, 0) time.strftime('%I:%M:%S %p', t)