6.10.7 strftime() Behavior
date, datetime, and time
objects all support a strftime(format)
method, to create a string representing the time under the control of
an explicit format string. Broadly speaking,
d.strftime(fmt)
acts like the time module's
time.strftime(fmt, d.timetuple())
although not all objects support a timetuple() method.
For time objects, the format codes for
year, month, and day should not be used, as time objects have no such
values. If they're used anyway, 1900 is substituted for the
year, and 0 for the month and day.
For date objects, the format codes for hours, minutes, and
seconds should not be used, as date objects have no such
values. If they're used anyway, 0 is substituted for them.
For a naive object, the %z and %Z format codes are
replaced by empty strings.
For an aware object:
- utcoffset() is transformed into a 5-character string of
the form +HHMM or -HHMM, where HH is a 2-digit string giving the
number of UTC offset hours, and MM is a 2-digit string giving the
number of UTC offset minutes. For example, if
utcoffset() returns
timedelta(hours=-3, minutes=-30),%zis replaced with the string'-0330'. - If tzname() returns
None,%Zis replaced by an empty string. Otherwise%Zis replaced by the returned value, which must be a string.
The full set of format codes supported varies across platforms, because Python calls the platform C library's strftime() function, and platform variations are common. The documentation for Python's time module lists the format codes that the C standard (1989 version) requires, and those work on all platforms with a standard C implementation. Note that the 1999 version of the C standard added additional format codes.
The exact range of years for which strftime() works also varies across platforms. Regardless of platform, years before 1900 cannot be used.
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Release 2.4, documentation updated on 29 November 2004.