Printing dates in a friendly format

Because people may want to see dates in many different formats, Python comes with very flexible functions for turning date objects into strings.

Let's see what event was recorded first in the Florida hurricane data set. In this exercise, you will format the earliest date in the florida_hurricane_dates list in two ways so you can decide which one you want to use: either the ISO standard or the typical US style.

This exercise is part of the course

Working with Dates and Times in Python

Exercise instructions

Assign the earliest date in florida_hurricane_dates to first_date.
Print first_date in the ISO standard. For example, December 1st, 2000 would be "2000-12-01".
Print first_date in the US style, using .strftime(). For example, December 1st, 2000 would be "12/1/2000".

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Assign the earliest date to first_date
first_date = ____(florida_hurricane_dates)

# Convert to ISO and US formats
iso = "Our earliest hurricane date: " + first_date.____()
us = "Our earliest hurricane date: " + first_date.____("____")

print("ISO: " + iso)
print("US: " + us)

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Working with Dates and Times in Python

IntermediateSkill Level

4.8+

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Hurricanes (also known as cyclones or typhoons) hit the U.S. state of Florida several times per year. To start off this course, you'll learn how to work with date objects in Python, starting with the dates of every hurricane to hit Florida since 1950. You'll learn how Python handles dates, common date operations, and the right way to format dates to avoid confusion.

Exercise 1: Dates in Python Exercise 2: Which day of the week?Exercise 3: How many hurricanes come early?Exercise 4: Math with dates Exercise 5: Subtracting dates Exercise 6: Counting events per calendar month Exercise 7: Putting a list of dates in order Exercise 8: Turning dates into strings Exercise 9: Printing dates in a friendly format

Current Exercise

Exercise 10: Representing dates in different ways

Bike sharing programs have swept through cities around the world -- and luckily for us, every trip gets recorded! Working with all of the comings and goings of one bike in Washington, D.C., you'll practice working with dates and times together. You'll parse dates and times from text, analyze peak trip times, calculate ride durations, and more.

Exercise 1: Dates and times Exercise 2: Creating datetimes by hand Exercise 3: Counting events before and after noon Exercise 4: Printing and parsing datetimes Exercise 5: Turning strings into datetimes Exercise 6: Parsing pairs of strings as datetimes Exercise 7: Recreating ISO format with strftime()Exercise 8: Unix timestamps Exercise 9: Working with durations Exercise 10: Turning pairs of datetimes into durations Exercise 11: Average trip time Exercise 12: The long and the short of why time is hard

In this chapter, you'll learn to confidently tackle the time-related topic that causes people the most trouble: time zones and daylight saving. Continuing with our bike data, you'll learn how to compare clocks around the world, how to gracefully handle "spring forward" and "fall back," and how to get up-to-date timezone data from the dateutil library.

Exercise 1: UTC offsets Exercise 2: Creating timezone aware datetimes Exercise 3: Setting timezones Exercise 4: What time did the bike leave in UTC?Exercise 5: Time zone database Exercise 6: Putting the bike trips into the right time zone Exercise 7: What time did the bike leave? (Global edition)Exercise 8: Starting daylight saving time Exercise 9: How many hours elapsed around daylight saving?Exercise 10: March 29, throughout a decade Exercise 11: Ending daylight saving time Exercise 12: Finding ambiguous datetimes Exercise 13: Cleaning daylight saving data with fold

To conclude this course, you'll apply everything you've learned about working with dates and times in standard Python to working with dates and times in Pandas. With additional information about each bike ride, such as what station it started and stopped at and whether or not the rider had a yearly membership, you'll be able to dig much more deeply into the bike trip data. In this chapter, you'll cover powerful Pandas operations, such as grouping and plotting results by time.

Exercise 1: Reading date and time data in Pandas Exercise 2: Loading a csv file in Pandas Exercise 3: Making timedelta columns Exercise 4: Summarizing datetime data in Pandas Exercise 5: How many joyrides?Exercise 6: It's getting cold outside, W20529 Exercise 7: Members vs casual riders over time Exercise 8: Combining groupby() and resample()Exercise 9: Additional datetime methods in Pandas Exercise 10: Timezones in Pandas Exercise 11: How long per weekday?Exercise 12: How long between rides?Exercise 13: Wrap-up