There is inconsistent behavior in time.strftime, comparing Python 2.6 and 3.1. In 3.1, non-ASCII Unicode characters seem to get dropped whereas in 2.6 you can keep them using the necessary Unicode-to-UTF8 workaround.
This should be fixed if it isn't intended behavior.
Python 2.6
>>> time.strftime(u"%d\u200F%A".encode("utf-8"), time.gmtime()).decode("utf-8")
u'03\u200fSaturday'
>>> time.strftime(u"%d\u0041%A".encode("utf-8"), time.gmtime()).decode("utf-8")
u'03ASaturday'
Python 3.1
>>> time.strftime("%d\u200F%A", time.gmtime())
''
>>> len(time.strftime("%d\u200F%A", time.gmtime()))
0
>>> time.strftime("%d\u0041%A", time.gmtime())
'03ASaturday'