DZone Snippets: strftime code

ISO 8601 date format for microformats

Aupajo (Pete) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:03:22 GMT

Used this in Ruby to get the ISO 8601 (see RFC 3339) full date format for an hEvent Microformat. Doubtless usable in other situations.



strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z')

How to use:



<%= event.start_date.to_s(:long) %>

Ruby strftime without leading zeros

timmorgan (Tim Morgan) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:49:47 GMT



Date.today.strftime('%b %d, %Y').gsub(/ 0(\d\D)/, ' \1')

Um... strike that. Seems %e does it without the extra work. Thanks Peter!

Formatting time

korakot (Korakot Chaovavanich) — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:51:42 GMT



>>> from e32db import format_time

>>> from time import *

>>> t = time()

>>>

>>> format_time(t)   # for Symbian SQL

u'06/03/2006 23:26:35'

>>> strftime('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S')  # like above

'06/03/2006 23:26:39'

>>> ctime()

'Mon Mar 06 23:26:49 2006'

>>> strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000")  # email RFC

'Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:26:59 +0000'

Here's the (shortened) table for strftime.



%a  weekday name.  

%A  weekday name (full).  

%b  month name.  

%B  month name (full).  

%c  date and time (locale)

%d  day of month [01,31].  

%H  hour [00,23].  

%I  hour [01,12].  

%j  day of year [001,366].  

%m  month [01,12].  

%M  minute [00,59].  

%p  AM or PM

%S  Second [00,61]

%U  week of year (Sunday)[00,53].

 w  weekday [0(Sunday),6].

 W  week of year (Monday)[00,53].

 x  date (locale).

%X  time (locale).

%y  year [00,99].

%Y  year [2000].

%Z  timezone name.

RFC-822 compatible dates in RSS feeds

peter (Peter Cooperx) — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 03:22:02 GMT

If you're building RSS 2.0 files with .rxml files on your Rails app, this sort of line will get you a valid date/time:

xml.pubDate(p.updated_at.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z"))

If you're just using strftime someplace else, perhaps in PHP, try:

strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")