How do you add : to a time formatted like this 203045 in python?

Question

I've been trying to get this time formatted value from 203045 to 20:40:45 in python. I clearly have no clue where to start. Any help will be appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Use strptime and strftime functions from datetime , the former constructs a datetime object from string and the latter format datetime object to string with specific format:

from datetime import datetime
datetime.strptime("203045", "%H%M%S").strftime("%H:%M:%S")
# '20:30:45'

Answer 2

you can also play with the regular expression to get the same result :)

import re
ch = "203045"
print ":".join(re.findall('\d{2}',ch))
# '20:30:45'

Answer 3

try this to remove the two last digits if they are equal to zero :

import re
ch = "20304500"
print ":".join([e for e in re.findall('\d{2}',ch) if e!="00"])
# '20:30:45'

or whatever (the two last digits) :

import re
ch = "20304500"
print ":".join(re.findall('\d{2}',ch)[:-1])
# '20:30:45'