What is the difference between datetime.timedelta
(from Python's standard library) and dateutil.relativedelta.relativedelta
when working only with days?
As far as I understand, timedelta
only supports days (and weeks), while relativedelta
adds support for periods defined in terms of years, months, weeks or days, as well as defining absolute values for year, month or day. (remember, for the purposes of this question, I don't have to worry about hours, minutes or seconds)
Considering that I'm only working with datetime.date
objects, and only interested in periods defined by the number of days, what's the difference between timedelta
and relativedelta
? Is there any difference?
from datetime import date, timedelta from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta i = -1 # This could have been any integer, positive or negative someday = date.today() # Is there any difference between these two lines? otherday = someday + timedelta(days=i) otherday = someday + relativedelta(days=i)
dateutil
is an extension package to the python standard datetime
module. As you say, it provides extra functionality, such as timedeltas that are expressed in units larger than a day.
This is useful if you have to ask questions such as how many months can I save before my girlfriend's birthday comes up, or what's the last Friday in the month? This hides complex calculations that are caused by the different lengths of the months, or extra days in leap years.
In your case, you are only interested in the number of days. So you'd best use timedelta
as this avoids an extra dependency on the dateutil
package.
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