Not sure if you're aware that strftime.org is currently down. I'm willing to host it on S3 myself, if you'd grant me license to do so.

There are many gotchas with formatting time, getting right time/date/datetime object, and choosing right syntax for popular formats. It would help to have a preformatted copy-pasteable snippets. I'd personally need 2014-08-27 01:00:00.00000 in UTC, but other formats, such as full ISO 8601 format are useful too.

Maybe from this source file?
http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Doc/library/datetime.rst#l1801

It would be nice if the code was in alphabetic order.

Thank you for this great reference with easy to remember URL.

There are some useful new codes in Python3, like %G and %V for iso-year and iso-week.
Would you consider an overhaul?

This is a good opportunity to improve on the python.org docs. An issue I've seen is that %z does unexpected things on Windows (http://bugs.python.org/issue20010). Instead of returning +HHHH it returns a string name of the time zone (often with Unicode characters). Code that uses it is liable to break when run in Windows.

It is not immediately clear from the description of "%f", "Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded on the left", that it can be used to parse millisecond fields.

It is safe to use for parsing millisecond fields, as explained in note [4] in the docs: "When used with the strptime() method, the %f directive accepts from one to six digits and zero pads on the right."

As you can see from e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/698223/how-can-i-parse-a-time-string-containing-milliseconds-in-it-with-python and this comment: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/698223/how-can-i-parse-a-time-string-containing-milliseconds-in-it-with-python#comment46200797_698279 this is confusing.

It might help people in the future to get note [4] included in this page?

I can't see an easy way to do that in your build.py, so I haven't created a PR for you, sorry.

I have Python 3.X installed on Windows 10. Just started learning and made it to the site looking at date representation. I got an error using the format placeholders. Attempting to use the format string '%B %-d, %-I:%M' netted me:

ValueError: Invalid format string

I figured I did something wrong but after looking at StackOverflow turns out I could have used # instead of -.

I do not know the specifics of why this is not working but I thought it would be worth mentioning somewhere that perhaps:

Note: If you using windows and encounter ValueError: Invalid format string when trying to remove leading 0's try using the ampersand in place of the hypen e.g '%B %#d, %#I:%M'

I see that string (platform specific) on the page and a link to the documentation but it was not obvious on that page what I had to do either :/

It's easy enough to figure out what each does, but it looks kind of silly.

Edit: Great reference though! I bookmarked it and I use it all the time

It would be wonderful if the website shows how to call the function in the first place:

>>> datetime.datetime(2013, 12, 25, 17, 15, 30).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
'2013-12-25 17:15:30'
>>> time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.gmtime())  # right now in UTC
'2014-04-21 00:15:59'
>>> time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime())  # right now in local time
'2014-04-21 00:16:21'

This page is a great idea, I use it semi-regularly :-)

One handy tip that might be worth adding is that on unix-like systems, %-d will give you the day of month without leading zeros. Not portable to Windows though.

When I use the following Python 3 URL (https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html) instead of the Python 2 URL (http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html), I get the error message below. It seems unrelated to me to the version of the web page

Here's the error message for the source code below :

`---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)
in
28 for row in table.select('tbody > tr'):
29 tds = row.find_all('td')
---> 30 directive = tds[0].find('span').string
31 # we use getText() here because some of the meanings have extra markup
32 meaning = tds[1].getText().replace('\n', ' ')

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'string'`

For the following source code :

`#!/usr/bin/env python3

""" Here's the same code but not executed inside a main() function."""

""" Found interesting enumeration of string formatting at https://strftime.org/

From the reference page's github module "build.py" located at
https://github.com/mccutchen/strftime.org"""

#I had to make a few modifications to get it to render the templated ouptut HTML on Windows 10 correctly.

import datetime
import sys
import urllib.request, urllib.error, urllib.parse

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pystache

url = 'https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html'
body = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(body, features="html.parser")

table = soup.find(id='strftime-and-strptime-behavior').find('table')
example_date = datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 30, 7, 6, 5)

directives = []
for row in table.select('tbody > tr'):
tds = row.find_all('td')
directive = tds[0].find('span').string
# we use getText() here because some of the meanings have extra markup
meaning = tds[1].getText().replace('\n', ' ')
example = example_date.strftime(directive)
directives.append({
'directive': directive,
'meaning': meaning,
'example': example
})

# Also add the non zero padded version for some of them
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28894172/why-does-d-or-e-remove-the-leading-space-or-zero

exclude = ['%f', '%y']
if 'zero-padded' in meaning and directive not in exclude:
    non_zero_padding_decimal = directive.replace("%", "%#")
    non_zero_padding_example = example_date.strftime(
        non_zero_padding_decimal
    )

    non_zero_padding_meaning = (
        meaning.replace("zero-padded", "") + " (Platform specific)")

    directives.append({
        'directive': non_zero_padding_decimal,
        'meaning': non_zero_padding_meaning,
        'example': non_zero_padding_example
    })

template_file = '.\strftime.org-master\templates\index.html.mustache'
template = open(template_file).read()
context = {
'example_date': str(example_date),
'example_date_repr': repr(example_date),
'directives': directives,
'timestamp': datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'),
}

Render the final context into the HTML template file

rendered_html = pystache.render(template, context)

create / open the output file for writing.

output_html = open("rendered_html.html", "wt")

Now write out the output file.

output_html.write(rendered_html)
output_html.close()

print(pystache.render(template, context))

import webbrowser

webbrowser.open('rendered_html.html')
webbrowser.open('https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html')`

It appears that http://strftime.org/ is locked to HTTP only, which is insecure.

#29
Hello @mccutchen . Thank you for sharing the link, but it does not contain what I am looking for. I meant to ask if strftime allows formatting a date with a suffix. Formatting examples like: May 5th, Jan 1st . I know it allows formatting like May 5, and Jan 1

Now that Python 3.5 is EOL, using f-strings can help you avoid striftime() on all current versions of CPython.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> f"{datetime.now():%Y-%m-%d %H:%M}"
'2020-09-22 12:19'

The problem is that it can be a bit confusing re the order of the dat/month.

Classic example is 1/11 would be lst of November or 11th January

To make it easier for everyone at work, I always use christmas day as the date..
as there is not a 25th month, and it a familiar date...

Just a suggestion..
Pete

Noticed some modifiers were missing from this list like %e

It would be great if there would be tags above the table to easily select all codes related to hours/days/etc.

Hello.
I would like to ask if the strftime module has a function that returns a date with its position . For example ;
02/12/2021 - 2nd
strftime.function_name('02/12/2021') # returns 2nd
and
04/11/2021 - 4th
strftime.function_name('04/12/2021') # returns 4th

The shorthand specifier for %Y-%m-%d

Would you be interested in a pull request that adds examples of commonly used formats for strftime?

I had to fix a few things to get this to run without error on Jupyter Notebook on Windows 10. Not sure exactly why the final output does not look exactly like the the website version. The CSS file is probably not being picked up correctly.

Don't have privileges to do pull request on this repo yet, so I cannot merge into main branch.

`#!/usr/bin/env python3

""" Here's the same code but not executed inside a main() function."""

Taken from the reference page's github module "build.py" located at https://github.com/mccutchen/strftime.org"""

#I had to make a few modifications to get it to render the templated ouptut HTML on Windows 10 correctly.

import datetime
import sys
import urllib.request, urllib.error, urllib.parse

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pystache


url = 'http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html'
body = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(body, features="html.parser")

table = soup.find(id='strftime-and-strptime-behavior').find('table')
example_date = datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 30, 7, 6, 5)

directives = []
for row in table.select('tbody > tr'):
    tds = row.find_all('td')
    directive = tds[0].find('span').string
    # we use getText() here because some of the meanings have extra markup
    meaning = tds[1].getText().replace('\n', ' ')
    example = example_date.strftime(directive)
    directives.append({
        'directive': directive,
        'meaning': meaning,
        'example': example
    })

    # Also add the non zero padded version for some of them
    # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28894172/why-does-d-or-e-remove-the-leading-space-or-zero

    exclude = ['%f', '%y']
    if 'zero-padded' in meaning and directive not in exclude:
        non_zero_padding_decimal = directive.replace("%", "%#")
        non_zero_padding_example = example_date.strftime(
            non_zero_padding_decimal
        )

        non_zero_padding_meaning = (
            meaning.replace("zero-padded", "") + " (Platform specific)")

        directives.append({
            'directive': non_zero_padding_decimal,
            'meaning': non_zero_padding_meaning,
            'example': non_zero_padding_example
        })
    
template_file = '.\\strftime.org-master\\templates\\index.html.mustache'
template = open(template_file).read()
context = {
    'example_date': str(example_date),
    'example_date_repr': repr(example_date),
    'directives': directives,
    'timestamp': datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'),
}

# Render the final context into the HTML template file
rendered_html = pystache.render(template, context)

# create / open the output file for writing.
output_html = open("rendered_html.html", "wt")

# Now write out the output file.
output_html.write(rendered_html)
output_html.close()

print(pystache.render(template, context))