How to calculate number of days between two given dates

Question

If I have two dates (ex. '8/18/2008' and '9/26/2008'), what is the best way to get the number of days between these two dates?

Answer 1

If you have two date objects, you can just subtract them, which computes a timedelta object.

from datetime import date

d0 = date(2008, 8, 18)
d1 = date(2008, 9, 26)
delta = d1 - d0
print(delta.days)

The relevant section of the docs: https://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html.

See this answer for another example.

Answer 2

Using the power of datetime:

from datetime import datetime
date_format = "%m/%d/%Y"
a = datetime.strptime('8/18/2008', date_format)
b = datetime.strptime('9/26/2008', date_format)
delta = b - a
print delta.days # that's it

Answer 3

Days until Christmas:

>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.date.today()
>>> someday = datetime.date(2008, 12, 25)
>>> diff = someday - today
>>> diff.days
86

More arithmetic here.