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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T04:28:30+00:00

If only timedelta had a month argument in it’s constructor. So what’s the simplest

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If only timedelta had a month argument in it’s constructor. So what’s the simplest way to do this?

EDIT: I wasn’t thinking too hard about this as was pointed out below. Really what I wanted was any day in the last month because eventually I’m going to grab the year and month only. So given a datetime object, what’s the simplest way to return any datetime object that falls in the previous month?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try this:

    def monthdelta(date, delta):
    m, y = (date.month+delta) % 12, date.year + ((date.month)+delta-1) // 12
    if not m: m = 12
    d = min(date.day, [31,
        29 if y%4==0 and (not y%100==0 or y%400 == 0) else 28,
        31,30,31,30,31,31,30,31,30,31][m-1])
    return date.replace(day=d,month=m, year=y)

>>> for m in range(-12, 12):
    print(monthdelta(datetime.now(), m))

    
2009-08-06 16:12:27.823000
2009-09-06 16:12:27.855000
2009-10-06 16:12:27.870000
2009-11-06 16:12:27.870000
2009-12-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-01-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-02-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-03-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-04-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-05-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-06-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-07-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-08-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-09-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-10-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-11-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-12-06 16:12:27.901000
2011-01-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-02-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-03-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-04-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-05-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-06-06 16:12:27.933000
2011-07-06 16:12:27.933000
>>> monthdelta(datetime(2010,3,30), -1)
datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 28, 0, 0)
>>> monthdelta(datetime(2008,3,30), -1)
datetime.datetime(2008, 2, 29, 0, 0)

    Edit Corrected to handle the day as well.

    Edit See also the answer from puzzlement which points out a simpler calculation for d:

    d = min(date.day, calendar.monthrange(y, m)[1])
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