Get rid of leading zeros for date strings in Python?

Question

Is there a nimble way to get rid of leading zeros for date strings in Python?

In the example below I'd like to get 12/1/2009 in return instead of 12/01/2009. I guess I could use regular expressions. But to me that seems like overkill. Is there a better solution?

>>> time.strftime('%m/%d/%Y',time.strptime('12/1/2009', '%m/%d/%Y'))
'12/01/2009'

See also

Python strftime - date without leading 0?

Solution 1

@OP, it doesn't take much to do a bit of string manipulation.

>>> t=time.strftime('%m/%d/%Y',time.strptime('12/1/2009', '%m/%d/%Y'))
>>> '/'.join( map( str, map(int,t.split("/")) ) )
'12/1/2009'

Solution 2

A simpler and readable solution is to format it yourself:

>>> d = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> "%d/%d/%d"%(d.month, d.day, d.year)
4/8/2012

Solution 3

I'd suggest a very simple regular expression. It's not like this is performace-critical, is it?

Search for \b0 and replace with nothing.

I. e.:

import re
newstring = re.sub(r"\b0","",time.strftime('%m/%d/%Y',time.strptime('12/1/2009', '%m/%d/%Y')))

Solution 4

>>> time.strftime('%-m/%-d/%Y',time.strptime('8/1/2009', '%m/%d/%Y'))
'8/1/2009'

However, I suspect this is dependent on the system's strftime() implementation and might not be fully portable to all platforms, if that matters to you.

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Comments

[c00kiemonster]

That's pretty much what I have in place, but as I said in the initial post, I just think it's a bit overkill to use re for such a trivial thing...

[Tim Pietzcker]

Well, you could split the string, lstrip the zeroes, and re-join the string, but that's probably much harder to read.

[John La Rooy]

Yeah, it does depend on the system's strftime. Doesn't work on Python2.6.1+WinXP for example

[Nick Farina]

This is what I ended up with, it results in the cleanest code in my opinion. I'm still shocked that this is so nontrivial though!

[Robert Johnstone]

took me ages to find the answer to this particular problem. I'm having to pass my date to the date class, and it only accepts date(d,m,yyyy) not date(dd,mm,yyyy)

[bones225]

There is now a better solution with Python 3: datetime.strptime("05/13/1999", "%m/%d/%Y").strftime("%m/%-d/%Y")