Datetime microseconds cutoff first zero in Django templates

[olofom@…]

So I had a datetime object that I wanted to display on a web page and then post back through a hidden field. This didn't work (unless I use the 'c' flag with the date filter to get the ISO format, then it works fine).

>>> datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 12, 9, 24, 16, 14070)
datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 12, 9, 24, 16, 14070)
>>> str(datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 12, 9, 24, 16, 14070))
'2013-09-12 09:24:16.014070'

BUT {{ timestamp|date:'Y-m-d H:i:s.u' }} prints:
2013-09-12 09:24:16.14070
without the first zero. Then when trying to convert this back to a datetime object I get:

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('2013-09-12 09:24:16.14070', "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f")
datetime.datetime(2013, 9, 12, 9, 24, 16, 140700)
>>> str(datetime.datetime.strptime('2013-09-12 09:24:16.14070', "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f"))
'2013-09-12 09:24:16.140700'

So in the end I ended up with the microseconds: 140700 instead of 014070, but the real bug is that the 'u' flag of date prints 14070 instead of 014070.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Technically, this is the documented behavior. ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/ says:

u Microseconds. 0 to 999999

and not:

u Microseconds. 000000 to 999999

That said, it isn't a very useful behavior :)

Django's dateformat mimicks PHP's date. I just checked that PHP left-pads the result with zeros.

I think it's just a bug that dates back to 2005, and I'm going to commit a fix shortly.

[Aymeric Augustin <aymeric.augustin@…>]

In 822cfce3df53301d9f9f4c14bd8a0cb2a1956e2e:

Fixed #18951 -- Formatting of microseconds.

Thanks olofom at gmail com for the report.