Format date without dash?

Question

In Python, we can convert a date to a string by:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.date(2002, 12,4).isoformat()
'2002-12-04'

How can we format the output to be '20021204', i.e. without dashes?

There are two functions, but I don't know how to specify the format:

date.strftime(format)
Return a string representing the date, controlled by an explicit format string. Format codes referring to hours, minutes or seconds will see 0 values. For a complete list of formatting directives, see section strftime() and strptime() Behavior.

and

date.__format__(format)
Same as date.strftime(). This makes it possible to specify format string for a date object when using str.format(). See section strftime() and strptime() Behavior.

Answer 1

You are using the wrong tool for your job, use strftime

>>> datetime.date(2002, 12,4).strftime("%Y%m%d")
'20021204'

For details on using strftime and strptime, refer strftime() and strptime() Behavior

For your particular case, I will quote the relevant excerpt

• %Y Year with century as a decimal number. 1970, 1988, 2001, 2013
• %m Month as a zero-padded decimal number. 01, 02, ..., 12
• %d Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number. 01, 02, ..., 31

alternatively, you could have always removed or replaced the hyphen from the isoformat

>>> str(datetime.date(2002, 12,4)).translate(None,'-')
'20021204'

Answer 2

You can use '%m%d%Y as your format :

>>> d=datetime.date(2002, 12,4)
>>> d.strftime('%m%d%Y')
'12042002'

Or in your first code, you can use str.replace :

>>> datetime.date(2002, 12,4).isoformat().replace('-','')
'20021204'