CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Oscar_Mariani
Oscar_Mariani

Reputation: 768

How to obtain the day of the week in a 3 letter format from a datetime object in python?

I am working on a script were I must work with datetime objects in Python. At some point I have one of those objects and I need to get the day of the week (which is a number value) in a 3-letter format (i.e. Tue, Wed, etc.). Here is a brief sample of the code, in dateMatch.group() all I am doing is getting pieces of a string obtained via regex matching.

from datetime import datetime

day = dateMatch.group(2)
month = dateMatch.group(3)
year = dateMatch.group(4)
hour = dateMatch.group(5)
minute = dateMatch.group(6)
second = dateMatch.group(7)

tweetDate = datetime(int(year), months[month], int(day), int(hour), int(minute), int(second))

From that date time object I get a numerical day value (i.e. 18) and I need to convert it to (i.e. Tue).

Thanks!

Upvotes: 14

Views: 18294

Answers (4)

cclauss
cclauss

Reputation: 751

Instead of hardcoding ["Mon","Tue","Wed","Thu","Fri","Sat","Sun"], try:

import calendar
weekdays = [x for x in calendar.day_abbr]  # in the current locale

Upvotes: 0

Nmorrison72
Nmorrison72

Reputation: 21

The doc I used: http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html

First you need todays date:

today = date.today() # Which returns a date object

The weekday can be found from a date object by using:

weekday = today.timetuple()[6] # Getting the 6th item in the tuple returned by timetuple

This returns days since Monday (0 would be Monday), using this integer you can do the following:

print ["Mon","Tue","Wed","Thu","Fri","Sat","Sun"][weekday] # Prints out the weekday in three chars

Combined you get:

from datetime import date

today = date.today() # Gets the date in format "yyyy-mm-ddd"
print today
weekday = today.timetuple()[6] # Gets the days from monday
print ["Mon","Tue","Wed","Thu","Fri","Sat","Sun"][weekday] # Prints out the weekday in three chars

Upvotes: 0

Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees

Reputation: 65884

The strftime method of a datetime object uses the current locale to determine the conversion.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> t = datetime.now()
>>> t.strftime('%a')
'Tue'
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'fr_FR')
'fr_FR'
>>> t.strftime('%a')
'Mar'

If this is not acceptable (for example, if you're formatting a date for transmission over an Internet protocol, you may actually require the string Tue regardless of the user's locale), then you need something like:

weekdays = 'Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun'.split()
return weekdays[datetime.now().weekday()]

Or you could explicitly request the "C" locale:

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'C')
return datetime.now().strftime('%a')

but setting the locale like this affects all formatting operations on all threads in your program, so it might not be such a good idea.

Upvotes: 7

Pavel Anossov
Pavel Anossov

Reputation: 62948

http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior

date, datetime, and time objects all support a strftime(format) method, to create a string representing the time under the control of an explicit format string.

...

%a — Locale’s abbreviated weekday name.

>>> datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%a')
   'Wed'

Upvotes: 23

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