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pythonstringstring-formatting

Fastest way to insert these dashes in python string?

So I know Python strings are immutable, but I have a string:

c['date'] = "20110104"

Which I would like to convert to

c['date'] = "2011-01-04"

My code:

c['date'] = c['date'][0:4] + "-" + c['date'][4:6] + "-" + c['date'][6:]

Seems a bit convoluted, no? Would it be best to save it as a separate variable and then do the same? Or would there basically be no difference?

Solution

  • You could use .join() to clean it up a little bit:

    d = c['date']
'-'.join([d[:4], d[4:6], d[6:]])