Question

I’ve noticed that the default Django’s datetime as a string looks like this (from the template):

April 4, 2012, 6 a.m.
April 14, 2012, 12:06 p.m.
April 14, 2012, midnight
April 14, 2012, noon
April 14, 2012, 6:02 a.m.

Notice how there are no trailing zeros in the date or the time. Also Django eliminates :00 minutes and also uses the string “noon” and “midnight” instead of the equivalent numerical times.

The closest I could get without coding a bunch of if–elif statements is this

# I'm using Django 1.4 with timezone support.
# timezone.now() is the same as `datetime.now()` but it's timezone "aware".
timezone.now().strftime('%B %d, %Y, %I:%M %p').replace( 'AM', 'a.m.' ).replace( 'PM', 'p.m.' )

But that would produce the following (using the same example above)

April 04, 2012, 06:00 a.m.
April 14, 2012, 12:06 p.m.
April 14, 2012, 12:00 a.m.
April 14, 2012, 12:00 p.m.
April 14, 2012, 06:02 a.m.

The reason I need to get a string is because I’m using ajax (specifically Dajax) so I have to return a string of datetime since I can’t store a Python object in JSON (even if I could, JavaScript won’t know how to interpret it).

So is there some sort of Django function that can convert datetime into the same string that Django’s template uses?

Answer 1

Using django.utils.dateformat which Steven linked to:

>>> import datetime
>>> from django.utils import dateformat
>>> dateformat.format(datetime.datetime.now(), 'F j, Y, P')
u'April 14, 2012, 1:31 p.m.'

P is the interesting extension to strftime, on line 93:

Time, in 12-hour hours, minutes and 'a.m.'/'p.m.', with minutes left off
if they're zero and the strings 'midnight' and 'noon' if appropriate.
Examples: '1 a.m.', '1:30 p.m.', 'midnight', 'noon', '12:30 p.m.'
Proprietary extension.