import locale, time locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'en-US') now = time.localtime() print 'ISO8601:', time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S", now) print 'RFC822 :', time.strftime("%a, %e %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z", now) locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, locale.getdefaultlocale()[0].replace('_', '-'))