Generating a Range of Dates in Python (standard library)

This post describes a recipe for generating a range of dates in Python (no dependencies - just standard library).

Generating range of dates

Let’s say you have two dates: 2024-02-01 (start date) and 2024-02-15 (end date). You need to generate a range of dates between these two.

Python does not have any builtin function/object that which specifically generates a range of dates. However, you can easily do it yourself by using datetime.date, datetime.timedelta objects along with looping.

Let’s take a look at code:

from datetime import date, timedelta

start_date = date(2024, 2, 1)
end_date = date(2024, 2, 5)

days_diff = (end_date - start_date).days

range_of_dates = [
    start_date + timedelta(days=i)
    for i in range(days_diff + 1)
]

print(range_of_dates)

Executing above snippet would produce following results:

[
    date(2024, 2, 1),
    date(2024, 2, 2),
    date(2024, 2, 3),
    date(2024, 2, 4),
    date(2024, 2, 5)
]

We start with calculating the difference in days between end and start date. Subtracting two dates returns a timedelta and we access .days property which an integer.

Then we construct a list comprehension that iterates over days difference. If you want to get inclusive range, then days_diff should be increased by 1 - otherwise just iterate over days_diff to get an exclusive range.

Summing a date and timedelta object results in a new date object (increased or decreased by the timedelta value). We use this fact in our comprehension expression - each iteration produces a new date (next day).

If you want to keep it in one line, that’s fine:

range_of_dates = [
    start_date + timedelta(days=i)
    for i in range((end_date - start_date).days + 1)
]

(11/52) This is a 11th post from my blogging challenge (publishing 52 posts in 2024).