Locale date formatting in Python

If your application is supposed to support more than one locale then getting localized format of date/time by changing locale (by means of locale.setlocale()) is discouraged. For explanation why it's a bad idea see Alex Martelli's answer to the the question Using Python locale or equivalent in web applications? (basically locale is global and affects whole application so changing it might change behavior of other parts of application)

You can do it cleanly using Babel package like this:

>>> from datetime import date, datetime, time>>> from babel.dates import format_date, format_datetime, format_time>>> d = date(2007, 4, 1)>>> format_date(d, locale='en')u'Apr 1, 2007'>>> format_date(d, locale='de_DE')u'01.04.2007'

See Date and Time section in Babel's documentation.

You can just set the locale like in this example:

>>> import time>>> print time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:38:56>>> import locale>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, "sv_SE") # swedish'sv_SE'>>> print time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")sön, 23 okt 2005 20:39:15

You should use %x and %X to format the date string in the correct locale. E.g. in Swedish a date is represented as 2014-11-14 instead of 11/14/2014.

The correct way to get the result as Unicode is:

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, lang)format_ = datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%a, %x %X')format_u = format_.decode(locale.getlocale()[1])

Here is the result from multiple languages:

Bulgarian пет, 14.11.2014 г. 11:21:10 ч.Czech pá, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Danish fr, 14-11-2014 11:21:10German Fr, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Greek Παρ, 14/11/2014 11:21:10 πμEnglish Fri, 11/14/2014 11:21:10 AMSpanish vie, 14/11/2014 11:21:10Estonian R, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Finnish pe, 14.11.2014 11:21:10French ven., 14/11/2014 11:21:10Croatian pet, 14.11.2014. 11:21:10Hungarian P, 2014.11.14. 11:21:10Italian ven, 14/11/2014 11:21:10Lithuanian Pn, 2014.11.14 11:21:10Latvian pk, 2014.11.14. 11:21:10Dutch vr, 14-11-2014 11:21:10Norwegian fr, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Polish Pt, 2014-11-14 11:21:10Portuguese sex, 14/11/2014 11:21:10Romanian V, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Russian Пт, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Slovak pi, 14. 11. 2014 11:21:10Slovenian pet, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Swedish fr, 2014-11-14 11:21:10Turkish Cum, 14.11.2014 11:21:10Chinese 周五, 2014/11/14 11:21:10