What's the most elegant way to get the end of the day (datetime)?

Question

I\'m currently writing some reporting code that allows users to optionally specify a date range. The way it works (simplified), is:

• A user (optionally) specifies a

Answer 1

After looking at some of the answers here, and not really finding anything extremely elegant, I did some poking around the standard library and found my current solution (which I like quite well): dateutil.

Here's how I implemented it:

from datetime import date
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

now = date.today()
stop_time = now + relativedelta(days=1)
start_time = date(
    # NOTE: I'm not doing dict.get() since in my implementation, these dict
    # keys are guaranteed to exist.
    year = options['year'] or now.year,
    month = options['month'] or now.month,
    day = options['day'] or now.day
)

if options['year']:
    start_time = date(year=options['year'] or now.year, month=1, day=1)
    stop_time = start_time + relativedelta(years=1)

if options['month']:
    start_time = date(
        year = options['year'] or now.year,
        month = options['month'] or now.month,
        day = 1
    )
    stop_time = start_time + relativedelta(months=1)

if options['day']:
    start_time = date(
        year = options['year'] or now.year,
        month = options['month'] or now.month,
        day = options['day'] or now.day,
    )
    stop_time = start_time + relativedelta(days=1)

# ... do stuff with start_time and stop_time here ...

What I like about this implementation, is that python's dateutil.relativedata.relativedata works really well on edge cases. It gets the days/months/years correct. If I have month=12, and do relativedata(months=1), it'll increment the year and set the month to 1 (works nicely).

Also: in the above implementation, if the user specifies none of the optional dates (year, month, or day)--we'll fallback to a nice default (start_time = this morning, stop_time = tonight), that way we'll default to doing stuff for the current day only.

Thanks to everyone for their answers--they were helpful in my research.