Enhancement Proposal: Standardized Support for Non-Zero-Padded Day and Month Formatting in datetime.strftime

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Python's datetime.datetime.strftime supports formatting directives for dates and times, such as %d for zero-padded days and %m for zero-padded months.
While there are platform-specific ways to get non-zero-padded day (%-d on Unix) or month (%-m), these do not work reliably across all platforms.. Particularly between Unix-like systems and Windows.

from datetime import datetime

dt = datetime(2025, 6, 6)

# On Unix:
dt.strftime("%-d. %-m. %Y")  # '6. 6. 2025'

# On Windows:
dt.strftime("%-d. %-m. %Y")  # Raises ValueError

I understand that strftime relies on the underlying C library for formatting, which is probably why this behavior differs between platforms. That said, if it's not practical to change this at the core level, maybe there could be some kind of wrapper or Python-level normalization to make things more consistent across systems.

Currently this requires a workaround such as usage of .format directly on the datetime object.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-138982
• gh-139002
• gh-139088
• gh-145018

Start at datetime.datetime.strftime and investigate how its directives depend on the underlying C library on Unix-like systems and Windows. Review the linked PRs before starting; done would mean a decided, consistent approach for non-zero-padded day and month formatting across platforms.