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[techtonik]

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.

[mccutchen]

@techtonik I think this is a good idea, but I'm having a hard time thinking of good examples.

I'd personally need 2014-08-27 01:00:00.00000 in UTC

What format is that? How would you picture this being displayed?

Re: ISO 8601 formatting, is there something missing from datetime.isoformat()? Would that example just tell people to use that method?

[techtonik]

I'd personally need 2014-08-27 01:00:00.00000 in UTC

What format is that? How would you picture this being displayed?

Re: ISO 8601 formatting, is there something missing from datetime.isoformat()? Would that example just tell people to use that method?

Yes, string returned by datetime.isoformat() is not fixed length. If microseconds are 0, it returns 2014-08-27 01:00:00

[mccutchen]

Another possible example I recently came across on my own that might be useful: Parsing the date strings returned by the Twitter API:

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Wed Jun 06 20:07:10 +0000 2012', '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y')
datetime.datetime(2012, 6, 6, 20, 7, 10)

[lonetwin]

@mccutchen having trouble coming up with examples ? Take a look at

• http://www.seehuhn.de/pages/pdate
• http://aboutsimon.com/2013/06/05/datetime-hell-time-zone-aware-to-unix-timestamp/
• http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/11/python-datetime-time-conversions/ ( I personally, have this bookmarked)

[RichardBronosky]

Rather than dump a bunch of examples, you could use JS to make a demo. It would just take 1 text field for the format string and an element in which to place the result. Make the codes clickable so that someone can come to the page, click a bunch of codes in the order they want, copy, and go.

You'd want to put a delimiter (like a space) after each clicked code and allow the user to either edit or remove to get their preference.

[techtonik]

@RichardBronosky can you demonstrate what are you speaking about? Is it some kind of interactive Jupyter notebook?

[treyhunner]

I made a tool that attempts to guess the format you need based on a datetime string: https://pym.dev/strptime

That page also includes a list of common formats to pick from (direct link to that here).

I've been a happy user of https://strftime.org for years but I was wanting something that's a bit more opinionated about the full format string. I linked to https://strftime.org and https://www.strfti.me (which I discovered from strftime.org) on that page because I still find these simple format code cheat sheets very useful, especially when working with odd datetime formats.