Locale date formatting in Python

How do I get datetime.datetime.now() printed out in the native language?

    >>> session.deathDate.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y")
    'Fri, 12 Jun 2009'

I'd like to get the same result but in local language.

If your application is supposed to support more than one locale then getting localized format of date/time by changing locale (by means of locale.setlocale()) is discouraged. For explanation why it's a bad idea see Alex Martelli's answer to the the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/1551508/95735 (basically locale is global and affects whole application so changing it might change behavior of other parts of application)

You can do it cleanly using Babel package like this:

>>> from datetime import date, datetime, time
>>> from babel.dates import format_date, format_datetime, format_time

>>> d = date(2007, 4, 1)
>>> format_date(d, locale='en')
u'Apr 1, 2007'
>>> format_date(d, locale='de_DE')
u'01.04.2007'

See Date and Time section in Babel's documentation.

You can just set the locale like in this example:

>>> import time
>>> print time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:38:56
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, "sv_SE") # swedish
'sv_SE'
>>> print time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")
sön, 23 okt 2005 20:39:15

You should use %x and %X to format the date string in the correct locale. E.g. in Swedish a date is represented as 2014-11-14 instead of 11/14/2014.

The correct way to get the result as Unicode is:

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, lang)
format_ = datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%a, %x %X')
format_u = format_.decode(locale.getlocale()[1])

Here is the result from multiple languages:

Bulgarian пет, 14.11.2014 г. 11:21:10 ч.
Czech pá, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Danish fr, 14-11-2014 11:21:10
German Fr, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Greek Παρ, 14/11/2014 11:21:10 πμ
English Fri, 11/14/2014 11:21:10 AM
Spanish vie, 14/11/2014 11:21:10
Estonian R, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Finnish pe, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
French ven., 14/11/2014 11:21:10
Croatian pet, 14.11.2014. 11:21:10
Hungarian P, 2014.11.14. 11:21:10
Italian ven, 14/11/2014 11:21:10
Lithuanian Pn, 2014.11.14 11:21:10
Latvian pk, 2014.11.14. 11:21:10
Dutch vr, 14-11-2014 11:21:10
Norwegian fr, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Polish Pt, 2014-11-14 11:21:10
Portuguese sex, 14/11/2014 11:21:10
Romanian V, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Russian Пт, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Slovak pi, 14. 11. 2014 11:21:10
Slovenian pet, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Swedish fr, 2014-11-14 11:21:10
Turkish Cum, 14.11.2014 11:21:10
Chinese 周五, 2014/11/14 11:21:10

Another option is:

>>> import locale
>>> import datetime
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME,'')
'es_CR.UTF-8'
>>> date_format = locale.nl_langinfo(locale.D_FMT)
>>> date_format
'%d/%m/%Y'
>>> today = datetime.date.today()
>>> today
datetime.date(2012, 4, 23)
>>> today.strftime(date_format)
'23/04/2012'

solution for russian language and cross platform

import sys
import locale
import datetime

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'rus_rus')
else:
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'ru_RU.UTF-8')

print(datetime.date.today().strftime("%B %Y"))

> Ноябрь 2017