[Python-ideas] Pythonic Dates, Times, and Deltas

[Masklinn]

On 2010-10-14, at 10:02 , Marco Mariani wrote:
> On 13 October 2010 23:17, Alexander Belopolsky <
> alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Make it easy to get a tuple of the start and end of the month
>> 
>> Why would you want this?  Start of the month is easy: just date(year,
>> month, 1).  End of the month is often unnecessary because it is more
>> pythonic to work with semi-open ranges and use first of the next month
>> instead.
> 
> Except next month may well be in next year.. blah
> 
> And I don't care about pythonic ranges if I have to push the values through
> a BETWEEN query in SQL.
> 
> import calendar
> import datetime
> 
> end = datetime.date(year, month, calendar.monthrange(year, month)[1])

There's also dateutil, which exposes some ideas of mx.DateTime on top of the built-in datetime, including relativedelta.

As a result, you can get the last day of the current month by going backwards one day from the first day of next month:

>>> datetime.now().date() + relativedelta(months=+1, day=+1, days=-1)
datetime.date(2010, 10, 31)

Or (clearer order of operations):

>>> datetime.now().date() + relativedelta(months=+1, day=+1) + relativedelta(days=-1)
datetime.date(2010, 10, 31)

(note that in both cases the "+" sign is of course optional).

Parameters without an `s` postfix are absolute (day=1 sets the day of the current datetime to 1, similar to using .replace), parameters with an `s` are offsets (`days=+1` takes tomorrow).