Generating all dates within a given range in python

Question

I have two string variables which contain dates in yyyy-mm-dd format as follows :

date1 = \'2011-05-03\'
date2 = \'2011-05-10\'

I want to write

Answer 1

Pandas is great for time series in general, and has direct support both for date ranges and date parsing (it's automagic).

import pandas as pd
date1 = '2011-05-03'
date2 = '2011-05-10'
mydates = pd.date_range(date1, date2).tolist()

It also has lots of options to make life easier. For example if you only wanted weekdays, you would just swap in bdate_range.

See https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/timeseries.html#generating-ranges-of-timestamps

Answer 2

import datetime
real_date1 = datetime.date(*[int(x) for x in date1.split('-')])
real_date2 = datetime.date(*[int(x) for x in date2.split('-')])
date_range =  real_date2 - real_date1
dates = list()
for days in xrange(date_range.days):
    dates.append(real_date1 + datetime.timedelta(days))

print dates

for python 3 use range instead of xrange.

Answer 3

from dateutil import rrule, parser

date1 = '2011-05-03'
date2 = '2011-05-10'

dates = list(rrule.rrule(rrule.DAILY,
                         dtstart=parser.parse(date1),
                         until=parser.parse(date2)))

print dates

Since dateutil is not a standard library, you will have to install it as a separate package. See the documentation for further details regarding the format (especially dayfirst and yearfirst switches).