In this short article I will show you how to use dateutil‘s parse, relativedelta and rrule to make it easier to work with datetimes in Python.
Firt some necessary imports:
>>> from datetime import date
>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta
>>> from dateutil.rrule import rrule, WEEKLY, WE
1. Parse a datetime from a string
This is actually what made me look into dateutil to start with. Camaz shared this technique in the forum for Bite 7. Parsing dates from logs
Imagine you have this log line:
>>> log_line = 'INFO 2014-07-03T23:27:51 supybot Shutdown complete.'
Up until recently I used datetime‘s strptime like so:
>>> date_str = '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'
>>> datetime.strptime(log_line.split()[1], date_str)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 3, 23, 27, 51)
More string manipulation and you have to know the format string syntax. dateutil‘s parse takes this complexity away:
>>> timestamp = parse(log_line, fuzzy=True)
>>> print(timestamp)
2014-07-03 23:27:51
>>> print(type(timestamp))
2. Get a timedelta in months
A limitation of datetime‘s timedelta is that it does not show the number of months:
>>> today = date.today()
>>> pybites_born = date(year=2016, month=12, day=19)
>>> (today-pybites_born).days
711
So far so good. However this does not work:
>>> (today-pybites_born).years
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
AttributeError: 'datetime.timedelta' object has no attribute 'years'
Nor this:
>>> (today-pybites_born).months
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
AttributeError: 'datetime.timedelta' object has no attribute 'months'
relativedelta to the rescue:
>>> diff = relativedelta(today, pybites_born)
>>> diff.years
1
>>> diff.months
11
When you need months, use relativedelta. And yes, we can almost celebrate two years of PyBites!
Another use case of this we saw in my previous article, How to Test Your Django App with Selenium and pytest, where I used it to get the last 3 months for our new Platform Coding Streak feature:
>>> def _make_3char_monthname(dt):
... return dt.strftime('%b').upper()
...
>>> this_month = _make_3char_monthname(today)
>>> last_month = _make_3char_monthname(today-relativedelta(months=+1))
>>> two_months_ago = _make_3char_monthname(today-relativedelta(months=+2))
>>> for month in (this_month, last_month, two_months_ago):
... print(f'{month} {today.year}')
...
NOV 2018
OCT 2018
SEP 2018
Let’s get next Wednesday for the next example:
>>> next_wednesday = today+relativedelta(weekday=WE(+1))
>>> next_wednesday
datetime.date(2018, 12, 5)
3. Make a range of dates
Say I want to schedule my next batch of Italian lessons, each Wednesday for the coming 10 weeks. Easy:
>>> rrule(WEEKLY, count=10, dtstart=next_wednesday)
As this will return an iterator and it does not show up vertically, let’s materialize it in a list and pass it to pprint:
>>> from pprint import pprint as pp
>>> pp(list(rrule(WEEKLY, count=10, dtstart=next_wednesday)))
[datetime.datetime(2018, 12, 5, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2018, 12, 12, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2018, 12, 19, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2018, 12, 26, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 2, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 9, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 16, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 23, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 30, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(2019, 2, 6, 0, 0)]
Double-check with Unix cal
$ cal 12 2018
December 2018
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31
$ cal 1 2019
January 2019
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31
$ cal 2 2019
February 2019
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
...
We added an exercise to our platform to create a #100DaysOfCode planning, skipping weekend days. rrule made this relatively easy.
And that’s it, my favorite use cases of dateutil so far. There is some timezone functionality in dateutil as well, but I have mostly used pytz for that.
Learn more? Check out this nice dateutil examples page and feel free to share your favorite snippets in the comments below.
Don’t forget this is an external library (pip install python-dateutil), for most basic operations datetime would suffice. Another nice stdlib module worth checking out is calendar.
Keep Calm and Code in Python!
— Bob