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

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 开发者_Python百科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?

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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')

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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')

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You should read from a file as Unicode and then convert it to Date-time format.

from datetime import datetime

f = open(LogFilePath, 'r', encoding='utf-8')
# Read first line of log file and remove '\n' from end of it
Log_DateTime = f.readline()[:-1]

You can define Date-time format like this:

fmt = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f"

But some programming language like C# doesn't support it easily, so you can change it to:

fmt = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

Or you can use like following way (to satisfy .%f):

Log_DateTime = Log_DateTime + '.000000'

If you have an unrecognized symbol (an Unicode symbol) then you should remove it too.

# Removing an unrecognized symbol at the first of line (first character)
Log_DateTime = Log_DateTime[1:] + '.000000'

At the end, you should convert string date-time to real Date-time format:

Log_DateTime = datetime.datetime.strptime(Log_DateTime, fmt)
Current_Datetime = datetime.datetime.now() # Default format is '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f'
# Calculate different between that two datetime and do suitable actions
Current_Log_Diff = (Current_Datetime - Log_DateTime).total_seconds()