Babel date_format returning 2016 for 2017 date

Question

I'm trying to display the date formatted for the specified language and I'm little surprised to see that:

babel.dates.format_date(date(2017,1,1), 'MMM Y')

gives the expected value which is:

u'Jan 2017'

while:

babel.dates.format_date(date(2017,1,1), 'MMM Y', locale='fr_FR')

gives me:

u'janv. 2016'

Why is it 2016 not 2017?

What’s the question? As to the abbreviated months, According to us poor sots across the pond, `janv.` is the correct french abbreviated month format for January (https://lts.library.cornell.edu/lts/pp/spp/mosabbr#french). — 2ps, Feb 05 '17 at 18:03

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 05 '17 at 18:32

8

This is because Y is giving you the week year. You need to use yyyy to get what you expect.

print format_date(date(2017,1,1), 'MMM yyyy')

print format_date(date(2017,1,1), 'MMM yyyy', locale='fr_FR')

Jan 2017
janv. 2017

answered Feb 05 '17 at 18:32

ScottSmudger

also see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Date_Field_Symbol_Table – Feb 05 '17 at 18:42

1 Answers1