Question

I’m using the datetime module, i.e.:

>>> import datetime >>> today = datetime.datetime.now() >>> print(today) 2009-03-06 13:24:58.857946 

and I would like to compute the day of year that takes leap years into account. e.g. today (March 6, 2009) is the 65th day of 2009.

I see a two options:

1. Create a number_of_days_in_month = [31, 28, ...] array, decide if it’s a leap year and manually sum up the days.

2. Use datetime.timedelta to make a guess & then binary search for the correct day of the year:

   >>> import datetime >>> YEAR = 2009 >>> DAY_OF_YEAR = 62 >>> d = datetime.date(YEAR, 1, 1) + datetime.timedelta(DAY_OF_YEAR - 1) 

These both feel pretty clunky & I have a gut feeling that there’s a more "Pythonic" way of calculating the day of the year. Any ideas/suggestions?

Answer 1

Use datetime.timetuple() to convert your datetime object to a time.struct_time object then get its tm_yday property:

from datetime import datetime day_of_year = datetime.now().timetuple().tm_yday  # returns 1 for January 1st