How can I filter a date of a DateTimeField in Django?

Question

Such lookups are implemented in django.views.generic.date_based as follows:

{'date_time_field__range': (datetime.datetime.combine(date, datetime.time.min),
                            datetime.datetime.combine(date, datetime.time.max))} 

Because it is quite verbose there are plans to improve the syntax using __date operator. Check "#9596 Comparing a DateTimeField to a date is too hard" for more details.

YourModel.objects.filter(datetime_published__year='2008', 
                         datetime_published__month='03', 
                         datetime_published__day='27')

// edit after comments

YourModel.objects.filter(datetime_published=datetime(2008, 03, 27))

doest not work because it creates a datetime object with time values set to 0, so the time in database doesn't match.

Here are the results I got with ipython's timeit function:

from datetime import date
today = date.today()

timeit[Model.objects.filter(date_created__year=today.year, date_created__month=today.month, date_created__day=today.day)]
1000 loops, best of 3: 652 us per loop

timeit[Model.objects.filter(date_created__gte=today)]
1000 loops, best of 3: 631 us per loop

timeit[Model.objects.filter(date_created__startswith=today)]
1000 loops, best of 3: 541 us per loop

timeit[Model.objects.filter(date_created__contains=today)]
1000 loops, best of 3: 536 us per loop

contains seems to be faster.

Now Django has __date queryset filter to query datetime objects against dates in development version. Thus, it will be available in 1.9 soon.