💻  Ian Wootten

~ 2 min read

Splitting a date range in Python

Dates are one of those annoying things that shouldn’t be, but are regularly difficult in web apps. I used the following two methods in a recent page to neatly break a date range into distinct segments as part of a analytics app I’m currently working on. Hopefully someone else will find them helpful.

import datetime, calendar

# Find the delta between two dates based on a desired number of ranges
def datedelta(startdate, enddate, no_of_ranges):
    start_epoch = calendar.timegm(startdate.timetuple())
    end_epoch = calendar.timegm(enddate.timetuple())

    date_diff = end_epoch - start_epoch

    step = date_diff / no_of_ranges

    return datetime.timedelta(seconds=step)

date_delta allows me to create the timedeltas between two dates based on a desired number of segments.

# Edit 18/07/2014 - I realised dates needed the hrs, mins an secs correctly
# adjusted to beginning / end of day
def datespan(startdate, enddate, delta=datetime.timedelta(days=1)):
    currentdate = startdate

    while currentdate + delta < enddate:
        todate = (currentdate + delta).replace(hour=23, minute=59,second=59)

        yield currentdate, todate

        currentdate += delta
        currentdate.replace(hour=0, minute=0,second=0)

I can then pass the delta into datespan above, which returns an iterable I can then use.

# Get timedeltas based on splitting the range by 10
delta = date_delta(startdate, enddate, 10)

for from_datetime, to_datetime in datespan(startdate, enddate, delta):
    print from_datetime, to_datetime

The result forms part of the following d3 chart: