Question

Is there a fairly easy way to convert a datetime object into an RFC 1123 (HTTP/1.1) date/time string, i.e. a string with the format

Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT 

Using strftime does not work, since the strings are locale-dependant. Do I have to build the string by hand?

Answer 1

You can use wsgiref.handlers.format_date_time from the stdlib which does not rely on locale settings

from wsgiref.handlers import format_date_time from datetime import datetime from time import mktime  now = datetime.now() stamp = mktime(now.timetuple()) print format_date_time(stamp) #--> Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:52:40 GMT 

You can use email.utils.formatdate from the stdlib which does not rely on locale settings

from email.utils import formatdate from datetime import datetime from time import mktime  now = datetime.now() stamp = mktime(now.timetuple()) print formatdate(     timeval     = stamp,     localtime   = False,     usegmt      = True ) #--> Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:55:46 GMT 

If you can set the locale process wide then you can do:

import locale, datetime  locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'en_US') datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT') 

If you don’t want to set the locale process wide you could use Babel date formating

from datetime import datetime from babel.dates import format_datetime  now = datetime.utcnow() format = 'EEE, dd LLL yyyy hh:mm:ss' print format_datetime(now, format, locale='en') + ' GMT' 

A manual way to format it which is identical with wsgiref.handlers.format_date_time is:

def httpdate(dt):     '''Return a string representation of a date according to RFC 1123     (HTTP/1.1).      The supplied date must be in UTC.      '''     weekday = ['Mon', 'Tue', 'Wed', 'Thu', 'Fri', 'Sat', 'Sun'][dt.weekday()]     month = ['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep',              'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec'][dt.month - 1]     return '%s, %02d %s %04d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT' % (weekday, dt.day, month,         dt.year, dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)