How do I get the day of week given a date?

Question

I want to find out the following: given a date (datetime object), what is the corresponding day of the week?

For instance, Sunday is the first day, Monday: second day.. and so on

And then if the input is something like today's date.

Example

>>> today = datetime.datetime(2017, 10, 20)
>>> today.get_weekday()  # what I look for

The output is maybe 6 (since it's Friday)

Answer 1

Use weekday():

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.today()
datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 23, 23, 24, 55, 173504)
>>> datetime.datetime.today().weekday()
4

From the documentation:

Return the day of the week as an integer, where Monday is 0 and Sunday is 6.

Answer 2

If you'd like to have the date in English:

from datetime import date
import calendar
my_date = date.today()
calendar.day_name[my_date.weekday()]  #'Wednesday'