Question

I have a list of object that, among other bits of data, include a date, and I need to create a list of all the objects where that date falls anytime last month, i.e. midnight on the 1st of last month < target data < midnight on the 1st of this month.

I also need the number of total objects that meet this criteria.

Right now, I’m going about it in a series of while loops, but I feel like there has to be a better way, particularly since my script hangs:

        post = 0 #the current post we're analyzing
        posts = 0 #the total number of posts in the month we actually care about
        lastmonthposts = [] #I think i can just get rid of this
        blog = pyblog.WordPress()

        date = blog.get_recent_posts(1 + posts)[0]['dateCreated']
        while (date > startthismonth):
            print "So far, there have been " + str(posts) + " posts this month we've counted."
            post = post + 1
            date = blog.get_recent_posts(1 + post)[0]['dateCreated']
        while (date > startlastmonth):
            print "So far, there have been " + str(posts) + " posts last month we've counted, which is " + str(date.timetuple().tm_mon) + "."
            posts = posts + 1
            post = post + 1
            date = blog.get_recent_posts(1 + post)[0]['dateCreated']
            lastmonthposts.append('blog')
        for blogpost in lastmonthposts:
            postnumber = blogpost['postid']
            comments = comments + int(blog.get_comment_count(postnumber)['approved'])

Answer 1

Instead of get_recent_posts() I would use get_page_list():

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

this_month_start = datetime.now().date().replace(day=1)
prev_month_start = (this_month_start - timedelta(days=1)).replace(day=1)

pages = blog.get_page_list()
last_month_pages = [
  p for p in pages
  if prev_month_start <= p['dateCreated'] < this_month_start]
last_month_approved_comment_count = sum(
  blog.get_comment_count(page['page_id'])['approved']
  for page in last_month_pages)

print "number of last month's pages:", len(last_month_pages)
print "number of approved comments for last month's pages:",
print last_month_approved_comment_count