Dates in Python

Working with Dates and Times in Python

Max Shron

Data Scientist and Author

Course overview

Chapter 1: Dates and Calendars
Chapter 2: Combining Dates and Times
Chapter 3: Time zones and Daylight Saving
Chapter 4: Dates and Times in Pandas

Dates in Python

Why do we need a date class in Python?

two_hurricanes = ["10/7/2016", "6/21/2017"]

How would you:

Figure out how many days had elapsed?
Check that they were in order from earliest to latest?
Know which day of the week each was?
Filter out hurricanes which happened between certain dates?

Creating date objects

# Import date
from datetime import date

# Create dates
two_hurricanes_dates = [date(2016, 10, 7), date(2017, 6, 21)]

Attributes of a date

# Import date
from datetime import date

# Create dates
two_hurricanes_dates = [date(2016, 10, 7), date(2017, 6, 21)]

print(two_hurricanes_dates[0].year)
print(two_hurricanes_dates[0].month)
print(two_hurricanes_dates[0].day)

2016
10
7

Finding the weekday of a date

print(two_hurricanes_dates[0].weekday())

Weekdays in Python
- 0 = Monday
- 1 = Tuesday
- 2 = Wednesday
- ...
- 6 = Sunday

Dates in Python

Working with Dates and Times in Python