strftime silliness

I want to format a date/time using a 12 hour representation of the time part. I can do this with, say, "%d %b %Y %l:%M %p", where the first time format specifier is the lower-case L. But, this gives me a leading space in the case that the hour is less than 12. I don't want this space. Anyone know of an simple way to avoid it? There appears to be no specifier to do this. Of course, I can call strftime twice, once for the date portion and once for the time portion, trimming the latter, but that seems clumsy. -- Cheers -- Tim