How to compare multiple dates in a list in Python?

Question

I am wondering how am I able to compare dates in a list. I would like to extract the "earliest" date. (I did a for loop as I had to replace some characters with '-')

comment_list = comment_container.findAll("div", {"class" : "comment-date"})
D =[]

  for commentDate in comment_list:
    year, month, day = map(int, commentDate.split('-'))
    date_object = datetime(year, month, day)
    date_object = datetime.strptime(commentDate, '%Y-%m-%d').strftime('%Y-%m-%d')   
    D.append(date_object)

print(D)

Output:

['2018-06-26', '2018-04-01', '2018-07-19', '2018-04-23', '2018-08-25', '2018-06-08', '2018-06-14', '2018-07-08', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15']

I want to extract the earliest date:

Eg.

'2018-04-01'

Answer 1

Just use the min function:

A = ['2018-06-26', '2018-04-01', '2018-07-19', '2018-04-23', '2018-08-25', '2018-06-08', '2018-06-14', '2018-07-08', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15', '2019-03-15']
print(min(A))

produces

2018-04-01

Answer 2

comment_list = comment_container.findAll("div", {"class" : "comment-date"})
D =[]

  for commentDate in comment_list:
    year, month, day = map(int, commentDate.split('-'))
    date_object = datetime(year, month, day)  
    D.append(date_object)

print(min(D))

You should keep the dates as datetime objects and then use the min() builtin function to determine the earliest date