Python parse int from django url parameter

Question

I'd like to parse a date from incoming URL parameters in my django application. I came up with:

def month_transactions(request, month, year):
    current_month = calculate_current_month(month, year)
    next_month = calculate_next_month(current_month)
    debit_transactions = Transaction.objects.filter(is_credit=False,
                                                    due_date__range=(current_month, next_month))
    credit_transactions = Transaction.objects.filter(is_credit=True,
                                                     due_date__range=(current_month, next_month))
    return render(request, 'finances/index.html', {
        'debits': debit_transactions,
        'credits': credit_transactions,
    })
def calculate_current_month(month, year):
    current_month = re.match('\d{2}', month)
    current_year = re.match('\d{4}', year)
    return_month = datetime.date(
        int(current_year.group()), int(current_month.group()), 1)
    return return_month

Where my URL.conf looks like:

url(r'^transactions/(?P<month>\d{2})/(?P<year>\d{4}/$)', views.month_transactions, name='index',),

Since 'month' and 'year' come in to month_transactions as unicode strings (year comes with a trailing /) I kept getting Type exceptions when creating a new date from the raw variables.

Is there a better approach; something built into Python or Django that I missed?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You're making things much more complicated than they need to be. month and year are passed as strings, so you can just call int(month) and int(year) - no need for all that strangeness with the regexes.

Year only comes in with a trailing slash because your close paren is in the wrong place in the urlconf regex - it should be directly after the }, as you have for month.