Using a Unicode format for Python's `time.strftime()`

Question

I am trying to call Python's time.strftime() function using a Unicode format string:

u'%d\u200f/%m\u200f/%Y %H:%M:%S'

(\u200f is the "Right-To-Left Mark" (RLM).)

However, I am getting an exception that the RLM character cannot be encoded into ascii:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u200f' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

I have tried searching for an alternative but could not find a reasonable one. Is there an alternative to this function, or a way to make it work with Unicode characters?

Answer 1

Many standard library functions still don't support Unicode the way they should. You can use this workaround:

import time
my_format = u'%d\u200f/%m\u200f/%Y %H:%M:%S'
my_time   = time.localtime()
time.strftime(my_format.encode('utf-8'), my_time).decode('utf-8')

Answer 2

You can format string through utf-8 encoding:

time.strftime(u'%d\u200f/%m\u200f/%Y %H:%M:%S'.encode('utf-8'), t).decode('utf-8')