How to display locale sensitive time format without seconds in python

Question

I can output a locale sensitive time format using strftime(\'%X\'), but this always includes seconds. How might I display this time format without seconds?

Answer 1

I would suggest special casing the returned T_FMT as there aren't that many to consider really:

$ for l in $(locale -a | grep utf8); do locale | cut -d= -f1 | LANG=$l xargs locale -kc | grep ^t_fmt=; done | sort -u

t_fmt="%H:%M:%S"
t_fmt="%H.%M.%S"
t_fmt="%H시 %M분 %S초"
t_fmt="ཆུ་ཚོད%Hཀསར་མ%Mཀསར་ཆ%S"
t_fmt="%H时%M分%S秒"
t_fmt="%H时%M分%S秒 %Z"
t_fmt="%H時%M分%S秒"
t_fmt="%I.%M.%S %p"
t_fmt="%I:%M:%S  %Z"
t_fmt="%I:%M:%S %Z"
t_fmt="%I.%M.%S. %Z"
t_fmt="%I時%M分%S秒 %Z"
t_fmt="kl. %H.%M %z"
t_fmt="%k,%M,%S"
t_fmt="%k:%M:%S"
t_fmt="%l:%M:%S"
t_fmt="%OH:%OM:%OS"
t_fmt="%OI:%OM:%OS %p"
t_fmt="%p%I.%M.%S %Z"
t_fmt="%r"
t_fmt="%t"
t_fmt="%T"
t_fmt="%Z %I:%M:%S "

Answer 2

Consider ICU, and pyICU.

>>> from icu import *
>>> locale = Locale('en_US')
>>> dtpg = DateTimePatternGenerator.createInstance(locale)
>>> pattern = dtpg.getBestPattern('hm a')             
>>> sdf = SimpleDateFormat(pattern, locale)           
>>> sdf.format(1507059935.0)                  
u'12:34 PM'
>>> locale = Locale('de_DE')
>>> dtpg = DateTimePatternGenerator.createInstance(locale)
>>> pattern = dtpg.getBestPattern('hm a')             
>>> sdf = SimpleDateFormat(pattern, locale)            
>>> sdf.format(1507059935.0)                   
u'12:34 nachm.'

Answer 3

The Babel library provides an easy and reliable solution for this problem. Here is a sample code using Python 2.

#!/usr/bin/env python2
from datetime import datetime
from babel.dates import format_time

date_time = datetime.now()
formatted_time = format_time(date_time, format='short', locale='en_US')
print formatted_time

Answer 4

This is bad solution. What happens with some new different locale?

Use following:

t.strftime(gettext('%H:%M'))

Now each translator for each languages would provide suitable format for each string, for en_US it would be '%I:M %p', for zh_TW: %H時%M分

This is how usually problems of missing resource in standard localization tools are solved.