python

Get the number of days between two dates in Python

Python is a programming language with many features and modules that allow for robust programming. One module, called datetime, allows for easy manipulation of dates and times. To get the number of days we can use the day() function of datetime module. In this post, we will explain multiple methods to do that.

from datetime import date

date_1 = date(2021, 7, 20)
date_2 = date(2021, 8, 23)

num_of_days = (date_2 - date_1).days

print(num_of_days)

Output

Here we are using Python datetime module to get the number of days. In the above code example:

We have defined two date variables date_1 and date_2.
Getting the number of using date_2 - date_1 syntax and assigning the result to num_of_days variable.
Printing the result.

Format date and get the number of days

We are formatting the date in month/date/year format and then we are calculating the number of days. We'll show you how to format dates in Python so that they're readable for humans, and how to calculate the number of days between two dates.

Code Example

from datetime import datetime

date_format = "%m/%d/%Y"
date_1 = datetime.strptime('10/25/2021', date_format)
date_2 = datetime.strptime('11/15/2021', date_format)

result = (date_2 - date_1).days

print(result)

Output

The syntax datetime.strptime(date_string, format) is used for converting date strings to datetime objects (i.e. datetime.datetime objects). The first argument is the date string that you want to convert, and the second argument is the date format that the date string is in. In this example, the date_string is in the format "MM/DD/YYYY".

The difference between two datetime objects (i.e. datetime.datetime objects) can be calculated using the syntax datetime_object_1 - datetime_object_2. The result is a datetime.timedelta object, which has an attribute called days, which is the number of days between the two datetime objects.

In this example, the difference between date_2 and date_1 is calculated, and the result (a datetime.timedelta object) is stored in the variable result. The days attribute of the result is then printed.

Get number of days from today to a date

The below code snippet shows how to get the number of days from today to a particular date in python.

from datetime import datetime

today = datetime.today()
my_date = datetime.strptime("20/07/2022", "%d/%m/%Y")

date_diff = my_date - today

print("The number of days is: ", date_diff.days)

Output

The number of days is:  45

Line by line explanation of the above code example:

The first line imports the datetime module.
The second line assigns the current date and time to the today variable.
The third line uses the datetime.strptime() method to parse a string and create a datetime object. The string format is "%d/%m/%Y".
The fourth line calculates the difference between the my_date and today variables.
The fifth line prints the number of days in the date_diff variable.

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