Quick tip: Formatting date/time data in Django

There are situations where you obtain JSON data from an external source (e.g. via a REST-API) which contains date and time Information in the ISO 8601 format which looks like this:

2020-10-27T13:47:25.662Z

If you now want to output this date/time information in a readable manner in Django you can either manually reformat the strings of this data to the format you prefer using python string operations:

"2020-10-27T13:47:25.662Z" => "2020.10.27 13:47:25"

This works but there some more flexible way to do this in Django using built-in template tags and filters in the templating engine.

For this you use the datetime.strptime class method to create a date-time object which in turn could be reformatted in the Django HTML-template in any way you like.

For this you probably need to reformat your JSON data to contain date-time objects instead string of date/time string.

from datetime import datetime
# Get JSON data
response = requests.post(URL)
json_data = response.json()['docs']
i=0
for entry in json_data:
	# create date-time objects by exactly defining the format of your date/time. Here we only use the first 19 chars because the miliseconds are not needed
  date_time_object = datetime.strptime(entry['created'][:19], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
  
	# replace string of date/time with the date-time objects 
	json_data[i]['created'] = date_time_object
  i = i+1

This list than can be used for the rendering of the Django HTML template:

template = loader.get_template('template.html')
	context = {
	    'json_data': json_data,
	    }
	return HttpResponse(template.render(context, request))

In the Django template the the date/time formatting is defined similar as in PHP’s date() function:

<table>
    <tr>
      <th>Entry</th>
      <th>Created</th>
    </tr> 

    {% for entry in json_data %}      
    <tr>
        <td>
          {{ entry.title }}
        </td>
        <td>
		{{ entry.created | date:"Y M d" }}
	</td>
      </tr>
    {% endfor %}

</table>