RFC 1123 Date Representation in Python?

Question

Is there a fairly easy way to convert a datetime object into an RFC 1123 (HTTP/1.1) date/time string, i.e. a string with the format

Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37         


        

Answer 1

You can use the formatdate() function from the Python standard email module:

from email.utils import formatdate
print formatdate(timeval=None, localtime=False, usegmt=True)

Gives the current time in the desired format:

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:32:33 GMT

In fact, this function does it "by hand" without using strftime()