How do I strftime a date object in a different locale? [duplicate]

Question

I have a date object in python and I need to generate a time stamp in the C locale for a legacy system, using the %a (weekday) and %b (month) codes. However I do not wish to change the application's locale, since other parts need to respect the user's current locale. Is there a way to call strftime() with a certain locale?

Answer 1

The example given by Rob is great, but isn't threadsafe. Here's a version that works with threads:

import locale import threading  from datetime import datetime from contextlib import contextmanager   LOCALE_LOCK = threading.Lock()  @contextmanager def setlocale(name):     with LOCALE_LOCK:         saved = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL)         try:             yield locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, name)         finally:             locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, saved)  # Let's set a non-US locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE.UTF-8')  # Example to write a formatted English date with setlocale('C'):     print(datetime.now().strftime('%a, %b')) # e.g. => "Thu, Jun"  # Example to read a formatted English date with setlocale('C'):     mydate = datetime.strptime('Thu, Jun', '%a, %b') 

It creates a threadsafe context manager using a global lock and allows you to have multiple threads running locale-dependent code by using the LOCALE_LOCK. It also handles exceptions from the yield statement to ensure the original locale is always restored.