Question

I’d like to format a string with two datetimes, using a particular format.

d1 = datetime.datetime.now()
d2 = datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=1)

daterange = [d1, d2]

fmt = '%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S'

I’m currently formatting the dates with strftime first:

string = "Date range: {} to {}".format(d1.strftime(fmt), d2.strftime(fmt))

Date range: 2013/02/05 12:22:12 to 2013/02/04 12:22:12

Is there a cleaner way?

Answer 1

You can supply the date format in the string itself:

string = "{0:%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S}".format(d1)

Following on from this, it’s a bit cleaner if we set the format from a parameter to format():

"Date range: {0:{2}} to {1:{2}}".format(d1, d2, fmt)

And we can even pass a single date range, and get all the dates from there using 0[index]

"Date range: {0[0]:{1}} to {0[1]:{1}}".format(daterange, fmt)

We could also use named fields, for more readability:

"Date range: {dates[0]:{fmt}} to {dates[1]:{fmt}}".format(dates=daterange, fmt=fmt)