Find the closest date to a given date

Question

I have an array of datetime objects, and I would like to find which element in the array is the closest to a given date (e.g datetime.datetime(2014,12,16))

This post shows how to find the nearest date which is not before the given date. How can I alter this code so that it can return dates that are before a given date?

For example, if the array housed elements datetime.datetime(2014,12,10) and datetime.datetime(2014,12,28), the former item should be returned because it is closest to datetime.datetime(2014,12,16) in absolute value.

Answer 1

This function will return the datetime in items which is the closest to the date pivot.

def nearest(items, pivot):     return min(items, key=lambda x: abs(x - pivot)) 

The good part this function works on types other than datetime too out of the box, if the type supports comparison, subtraction and abs, e.g.: numbers and vector types.