How to create date timestamp logs like git log

Question

Using datetime.datetime.now() , I receive some badly formatted timestamps.

Is there an intuitive way of creating a date timestamp in this format?

Wed Aug 7 13:38:59 2019 -0500

This is seen in git log.

Answer 1

You can use datetime.datetime.strftime() to format dates as shown below:

from datetime import datetime
d = '2019-08-07 13:38:59-0500'
d2 = datetime.strptime(d, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%z')
d3 = d2.strftime('%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %z')
print(d3)

This returns:

Wed Aug 07 13:38:59 2019 -050000

This website is a great resource for strftime formatting.

Answer 2

You can still use the datetime library. Using strftime, you can rewrite the datetime object into a nicely formatted string.

In your case, you are going for Wed Aug 7 13:38:59 2019 -0500 , which translated to strftime formatting is "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %z" .

Overall, it'd be

datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %z")

Which will give a string that looks like 'Wed Aug 7 13:38:59 2019 -0500'.

Answer 3

I would do the following:

from time import gmtime, strftime

if __name__ == "__main__":
    time = strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000", gmtime())
    print(time)

This was found on the documentation page of the time module. There are also a lot of additional features you might be interested in using outlined here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html#time.strftime