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 generator in a list comprehension.
day_count = (end_date - start_date).days + 1
for single_date in [d for d in (start_date + timedelta(n) for n in range(day_count)) if d <= end_date]:
print strftime("%Y-%m-%d", single_date.timetuple())
start_date
and end_date
variables are datetime.date
objects because I don't need the timestamps. (They're going to be used to generate a report).For a start date of 2009-05-30
and an end date of 2009-06-09
:
2009-05-30
2009-05-31
2009-06-01
2009-06-02
2009-06-03
2009-06-04
2009-06-05
2009-06-06
2009-06-07
2009-06-08
2009-06-09
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.
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()
.