How to Convert datetime to String in Python?

In Python, you may convert a date to string that is in an easily readable format to the users in different ways.

Being able to format date by string conversion is important as the default way of displaying the date, for example, as using the now() function of datetime module returns as follows:

So, what if you want to display the date like these:

13/12/2018

13 Dec 2018

13 December, 18

Thursday, 13 Dec 2018

And so on.

The strftime() function is also available in date and time modules for creating the string representing the date in the required format.

In the section below, a few examples of strftime() function are given in different date formats. You may also see examples of using format() function for converting date into string.

An example of datetime to string by strftime()

In this example, we will get the current date by using the now() function of the datetime module and then convert this to a string by strftime() function in the following format:

See the code and output below:

#Date conversion to string

import datetime

dt_date = datetime.datetime.now()

print ("The Current date is:" ,dt_date)
print("In specified format:", dt_date.strftime("%A, %d %b %Y"))

The output:

The example with specified date arguments

In this example, the date values are given in the datetime() function. The datetime() function belongs to datetime module. This is followed by using the strftime() for creating the string representing that date:

#Date conversion to string example
import datetime

dt = datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 16, 0, 0)

date_string = dt.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
print("The string representation of date in mm/dd/yyyy:", date_string)

The output:

You may see the list of directives for date formatting here.

String representation of date and time example

In this example, I also used time related directives for showing the current time along with the date in dd/mm/yy format. The complete date and time should be displayed like this:

Have a look at the code and output:

#Date conversion to string example
import datetime


current_date_time = datetime.datetime.today()

dt_string = current_date_time.strftime('%d/%m/%y %I:%M %S %p')
print("Date/Time in dd/mm/yy Hour:Min Second AM/PM:", dt_string)

The output as this code is executed:

The example of using format() function

As mentioned earlier, you may also use format() function with the date directives to get the string representation of date and time.

The directives are provided within curly brackets preceded by the colon mark.

The example below shows displaying date and time in various formats using the format() function with different directives:

#Date conversion to string example

import datetime


cur_dt1 = datetime.datetime.today()

dt_str1 = '{:%a, %b %d %Y}'.format(cur_dt1)
dt_str2 = '{:%A, %B %d %Y}'.format(cur_dt1)
dt_str3 = '{:%m/%d/%Y}'.format(cur_dt1)
dt_str4 = '{:%d-%m-%Y}'.format(cur_dt1)
dt_str5 = '{:%m/%d/%y %H:%M %S}'.format(cur_dt1)

dt_str6 = '{:%m/%d/%y %I:%M %S %p}'.format(cur_dt1)



print(dt_str1)

print(dt_str2)

print(dt_str3)

print(dt_str4)

print(dt_str5)

print(dt_str6)

The output: