Question

I’m adding UTC time strings to Bitbucket API responses that currently only contain Amsterdam (!) time strings. For consistency with the UTC time strings returned elsewhere, the desired format is 2011-11-03 11:07:04 (followed by +00:00, but that’s not germane).

What’s the best way to create such a string (without a microsecond component) from a datetime instance with a microsecond component?

>>> import datetime
>>> print unicode(datetime.datetime.now())
2011-11-03 11:13:39.278026

I’ll add the best option that’s occurred to me as a possible answer, but there may well be a more elegant solution.

Edit: I should mention that I’m not actually printing the current time – I used datetime.now to provide a quick example. So the solution should not assume that any datetime instances it receives will include microsecond components.

Answer 1

If you want to format a datetime object in a specific format that is different from the standard format, it’s best to explicitly specify that format:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
'2011-11-03 18:21:26'

See the documentation of datetime.strftime() for an explanation of the % directives.

Starting from Python 3.6, the isoformat() method is flexible enough to also produce this format:

datetime.datetime.now().isoformat(sep=" ", timespec="seconds")