title: Using a Unicode format for Python's `time.strftime()`
body: <p>I am trying to call Python's <code>time.strftime()</code> function using a Unicode format string:</p>
  
  <pre><code>u'%d\u200f/%m\u200f/%Y %H:%M:%S'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(<a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200f/index.htm" rel="noreferrer"><code>\u200f</code></a> is the "Right-To-Left Mark" (RLM).)</p>
  
  <p>However, I am getting an exception that the RLM character cannot be encoded into ascii:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u200f' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I have tried searching for an alternative but could not find a reasonable one. Is there an alternative to this function, or a way to make it work with Unicode characters?</p>