Question

I am somewhat new to Python. I need two functions. The first is supposed to get the current date and then return the starting and ending dates of that month e.g if current date is 02/12/2012, it should return 02/01/2012 and 02/29/2012. The second function does something similar but instead returns the beginning & ending dates of the previous month. Please how can I do that in Python? Thanks in anticipation

Answer 1

OK — I’m bored.

First, unless you are from Mars or somewhere, we here on Earth begin every month with 1. Safe assumption.

The only challenging part is the number of days in the month. You can get that from calendar.monthrange()

>>> import calendar
>>> calendar.monthrange(2012,2)
(2, 29)

The second number there is the ending day of that month in that year. So you can do:

import calendar
import datetime

def mSandE(yy,mm):
    lastDay=calendar.monthrange(yy,mm)[1]
    dt1=datetime.date(yy, mm, 1)
    dt2=datetime.date(yy, mm, lastDay)
    return (dt1, dt2)

def prevmSandE(yy,mm):
    dt=mSandE(yy,mm)[0]
    dt=dt-datetime.timedelta(days=1)
    lastDay=calendar.monthrange(dt.year,dt.month)[1]
    return (dt.replace(day=1),datetime.date(dt.year,dt.month,lastDay))


print mSandE(2012,2)        
print prevmSandE(2012,2)
print prevmSandE(2012,1)

Prints:

(datetime.date(2012, 2, 1), datetime.date(2012, 2, 29))
(datetime.date(2012, 1, 1), datetime.date(2012, 1, 31))
(datetime.date(2011, 12, 1), datetime.date(2011, 12, 31))