Best way to find the months between two dates

Solution 1:

Start by defining some test cases, then you will see that the function is very simple and needs no loops

from datetime import datetime

def diff_month(d1, d2):
    return (d1.year - d2.year) * 12 + d1.month - d2.month

assert diff_month(datetime(2010,10,1), datetime(2010,9,1)) == 1
assert diff_month(datetime(2010,10,1), datetime(2009,10,1)) == 12
assert diff_month(datetime(2010,10,1), datetime(2009,11,1)) == 11
assert diff_month(datetime(2010,10,1), datetime(2009,8,1)) == 14

You should add some test cases to your question, as there are lots of potential corner cases to cover - there is more than one way to define the number of months between two dates.

Solution 2:

One liner to find a list of datetimes, incremented by month, between two dates.

import datetime
from dateutil.rrule import rrule, MONTHLY

strt_dt = datetime.date(2001,1,1)
end_dt = datetime.date(2005,6,1)

dates = [dt for dt in rrule(MONTHLY, dtstart=strt_dt, until=end_dt)]

Solution 3:

This worked for me -

from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import relativedelta
date1 = datetime.strptime('2011-08-15 12:00:00', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
date2 = datetime.strptime('2012-02-15', '%Y-%m-%d')
r = relativedelta.relativedelta(date2, date1)
r.months + (12*r.years)

Solution 4:

You can easily calculate this using rrule from dateutil module:

from dateutil import rrule
from datetime import date

print(list(rrule.rrule(rrule.MONTHLY, dtstart=date(2013, 11, 1), until=date(2014, 2, 1))))

will give you:

 [datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 1, 0, 0),
 datetime.datetime(2013, 12, 1, 0, 0),
 datetime.datetime(2014, 1, 1, 0, 0),
 datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 1, 0, 0)]