Is there a simple way to format upload_date?

[friskyweasel]

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Hello! Youtube-DL is a fantastic tool - thanks to you all for all of your hard work on this project! My question is about the upload_date filename functionality. Lets say I have a youtube-dl command like this:

youtube-dl -i -o "/videos/%(upload_date)s_%(title)s.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=AnyValidPlaylistCodeHere

It works perfectly, but instead of the first portion of the downloaded file being something like "20170209_", I would like it to be "2017-02-09_". I thought this would be a 5-minute thing, but after reading/searching, I can't see a simple way to do it. I noted someone had requested to convert the %(NAME)s renaming functionality to python string.format {}, but it did not look like his code commits were accepted (they broke other functionality). I also noticed this "Utils.py" file in the main Git archive, but was not sure how to utilize it.

I am running Linux Mint 17.2 with xfce desktop. Would I need to use some sort of external post-processing to reformat the date in my downloaded file names? I was 99% sure there would be some simple way to accomplish it in youtube-dl, but i'm afraid i'm stumped. I would love if someone could give me the "most common / simplest" approach to such a renaming task in linux...the solution doesn't have to necessarily involve using youtube-dl....it's awesome enough as it is! : )

Thanks for any help you can provide...

[cqnkxy]

Why not simply write a Python script to do the formatting for you?

If you wanna to modify youtube-dl, I found that upload_date is formatted by calling unified_strdate in utils.py, which will format the date to the form of YYYYMMDD. And the unified_strdate is used solely on upload_date. So it's trivial to change the output of unified_strdate to your desired format, but it will cause problem for the date_from_str function within utils.py, which doesn't take care of your desired date format. We need to add compatibility in the latter function. So if you just wanna the naming conversion, modify the format specifier in unified_strdate, and add a compatible rule in date_from_str, then you are good to go(without caring for test cases for unified_strdate).

[friskyweasel]

thanks cqnkxy - this is exactly what i was looking for - i ended up using a little bash script to do it (im a noob to bash)...but your excellent youtube-dl specific input will give me some new areas to explore - thanks for your help!

in case any other noobs want the steps i used to modify the date:
#problem: i was prefixing my files with the youtube-dl upload date, but for plex, i needed the dates in yyyy-mm-dd format rather than yyyymmdd format

#steps taken inside my bash script:
#when calling youtube-dl, i used the -o operator to prefix file name with upload_date:
#-o "/path/to/your/download/directory/%(upload_date)s_%(title)s.%(ext)s"

#once youtube-dl was finished, used this little fix_dates function to loop through the downloaded files and manually add the "-" to create yyyy-mm-dd format

fix_dates() {
cd $1

for file in *
do
#if 5th char is a -, we assume we have already modified its date
if [ ${file:4:1} = "-" ]; then
echo date already formatted
else
echo date NOT already formatted - fixing it now
mv "$file" "${file:0:4}-${file:4:2}-${file:6}"
fi
done
}

#call function
fix_dates "/path/to/your/download/directory"