How to print a date in a regular format?

Question

This is my code:

import datetime
today = datetime.date.today()
print today

This prints: 2008-11-22 which is exactly what I want BUT....I have a list I'm appending this to and then suddenly everything goes "wonky". Here is the code:

import datetime
mylist = []
today = datetime.date.today()
mylist.append(today)
print mylist

This prints the following:

[datetime.date(2008, 11, 22)]

How on earth can I get just a simple date like "2008-11-22"?

Answer 1

With type-specific datetime string formatting (see nk9's answer using str.format().) in a Formatted string literal (since Python 3.6, 2016-12-23):

>>> import datetime
>>> f"{datetime.datetime.now():%Y-%m-%d}"
'2017-06-15'

The date/time format directives are not documented as part of the Format String Syntax but rather in date, datetime, and time's strftime() documentation. The are based on the 1989 C Standard, but include some ISO 8601 directives since Python 3.6.

Answer 2

I don't fully understand but, can use pandas for getting times in right format:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.to_datetime('now')
Timestamp('2018-10-07 06:03:30')
>>> print(pd.to_datetime('now'))
2018-10-07 06:03:47
>>> pd.to_datetime('now').date()
datetime.date(2018, 10, 7)
>>> print(pd.to_datetime('now').date())
2018-10-07
>>> 

And:

>>> l=[]
>>> l.append(pd.to_datetime('now').date())
>>> l
[datetime.date(2018, 10, 7)]
>>> map(str,l)
<map object at 0x0000005F67CCDF98>
>>> list(map(str,l))
['2018-10-07']

But it's storing strings but easy to convert:

>>> l=list(map(str,l))
>>> list(map(pd.to_datetime,l))
[Timestamp('2018-10-07 00:00:00')]

Answer 3

You may want to append it as a string?

import datetime 
mylist = [] 
today = str(datetime.date.today())
mylist.append(today) 
print mylist