Simon Willison’s Weblog

Python snippet: ordinalth(n)

8th October 2003

Blogged so I don’t lose it (blogging as external memory):

def ordinalth(n):
    """ 1 => 1st, 2 => 2nd etc """
    last = n - n / 10 * 10
    if last == 1:
        return '%dst' % n
    if last == 2:
        return '%dnd' % n
    if last == 3:
        return '%drd' % n
    return '%dth' % n

Update: See comments for improved version.