Python Tutorial: Turning dates into strings

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/working-with-dates-and-times-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Python has a very flexible set of tools for turning dates back into strings to be easily read. We want to put dates back into strings when, for example, we want to print results, but also if we want to put dates into filenames, or if we want to write dates out to CSV or Excel files. For example, let's create a date and see how Python prints it by default. As before, we import date from datetime and let's again create an object for November 5th, 2017. When we ask Python to print the date, it prints the year, day and then the month, separated by dashes, and always with two digits for the day and month. In the comment, you can see I've noted this as YYYY-MM-DD; four digit year, two digit month, and two digit day of the month. This default format is also known as ISO format, or ISO 8601 format, after the international standard ISO 8601 that it is based on. ISO 8601 strings are always the same length since month and day are written with 0s when they are less than 10. We'll talk about another advantage of ISO 8601 in a moment. If we want the ISO representation of a date as a string, say to write it to a CSV file instead of just printing it, you can call the isoformat() method. In this example, we put it inside a list so you can see that it creates a string. The ISO 8601 format has another nice advantage. To demonstrate, we've created a variable called some_dates and represented two dates here as strings: January 1, 2000, and December 31, 1999. Dates formatted as ISO 8601 strings sort correctly. When we print the sorted version of this list, the earlier day is first, and the later date is second. For example, if we use ISO 8601 dates in filenames, they can be correctly sorted from earliest to latest. If we had month or day first, the s