Iterating through a range of dates in Python

Question

I have the following code to do this, but how can I do it better? Right now I think it\'s better than nested loops, but it starts to get Perl-one-linerish when you have a ge

Answer 1

This might be more clear:

from datetime import date, timedelta

start_date = date(2019, 1, 1)
end_date = date(2020, 1, 1)
delta = timedelta(days=1)
while start_date <= end_date:
    print (start_date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"))
    start_date += delta

Answer 2

Slightly different approach to reversible steps by storing range args in a tuple.

def date_range(start, stop, step=1, inclusive=False):
    day_count = (stop - start).days
    if inclusive:
        day_count += 1

    if step > 0:
        range_args = (0, day_count, step)
    elif step < 0:
        range_args = (day_count - 1, -1, step)
    else:
        raise ValueError("date_range(): step arg must be non-zero")

    for i in range(*range_args):
        yield start + timedelta(days=i)

Answer 3

Numpy's arange function can be applied to dates:

import numpy as np
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
d0 = datetime(2009, 1,1)
d1 = datetime(2010, 1,1)
dt = timedelta(days = 1)
dates = np.arange(d0, d1, dt).astype(datetime)

The use of astype is to convert from numpy.datetime64 to an array of datetime.datetime objects.

Answer 4

Why are there two nested iterations? For me it produces the same list of data with only one iteration:

for single_date in (start_date + timedelta(n) for n in range(day_count)):
    print ...

And no list gets stored, only one generator is iterated over. Also the "if" in the generator seems to be unnecessary.

After all, a linear sequence should only require one iterator, not two.

Update after discussion with John Machin:

Maybe the most elegant solution is using a generator function to completely hide/abstract the iteration over the range of dates:

from datetime import timedelta, date

def daterange(start_date, end_date):
    for n in range(int((end_date - start_date).days)):
        yield start_date + timedelta(n)

start_date = date(2013, 1, 1)
end_date = date(2015, 6, 2)
for single_date in daterange(start_date, end_date):
    print(single_date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"))

NB: For consistency with the built-in range() function this iteration stops before reaching the end_date. So for inclusive iteration use the next day, as you would with range().

Answer 5

You can generate a series of date between two dates using the pandas library simply and trustfully

import pandas as pd

print pd.date_range(start='1/1/2010', end='1/08/2018', freq='M')

You can change the frequency of generating dates by setting freq as D, M, Q, Y (daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly )

Answer 6

> pip install DateTimeRange

from datetimerange import DateTimeRange

def dateRange(start, end, step):
        rangeList = []
        time_range = DateTimeRange(start, end)
        for value in time_range.range(datetime.timedelta(days=step)):
            rangeList.append(value.strftime('%m/%d/%Y'))
        return rangeList

    dateRange("2018-09-07", "2018-12-25", 7)  

    Out[92]: 
    ['09/07/2018',
     '09/14/2018',
     '09/21/2018',
     '09/28/2018',
     '10/05/2018',
     '10/12/2018',
     '10/19/2018',
     '10/26/2018',
     '11/02/2018',
     '11/09/2018',
     '11/16/2018',
     '11/23/2018',
     '11/30/2018',
     '12/07/2018',
     '12/14/2018',
     '12/21/2018']