What's the simplest way to subtract a month from a date in Python?

Question

If only timedelta had a month argument in it's constructor. So what's the simplest way to do this?

EDIT: I wasn't thinking too hard about this as was pointed out below. Really what I wanted was any day in the last month because eventually I'm going to grab the year and month only. So given a datetime object, what's the simplest way to return any datetime object that falls in the previous month?

Answer 1

date.replace(year, month, day)

Return a date with the same value, except for those members given new values by whichever keyword arguments are specified. For example, if d == date(2002, 12, 31), then d.replace(day=26) == date(2002, 12, 26).

http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html

newdate = olddate.replace(month=olddate.month-1)

Answer 2

If only timedelta had a month argument in it's constructor. So what's the simplest way to do this?

What do you want the result to be when you subtract a month from, say, a date that is March 30? That is the problem with adding or subtracting months: months have different lengths! In some application an exception is appropriate in such cases, in others "the last day of the previous month" is OK to use (but that's truly crazy arithmetic, when subtracting a month then adding a month is not overall a no-operation!), in others yet you'll want to keep in addition to the date some indication about the fact, e.g., "I'm saying Feb 28 but I really would want Feb 30 if it existed", so that adding or subtracting another month to that can set things right again (and the latter obviously requires a custom class holding a data plus s/thing else).

There can be no real solution that is tolerable for all applications, and you have not told us what your specific app's needs are for the semantics of this wretched operation, so there's not much more help that we can provide here.

Answer 3

Try this:

def monthdelta(date, delta):
    m, y = (date.month+delta) % 12, date.year + ((date.month)+delta-1) // 12
    if not m: m = 12
    d = min(date.day, [31,
        29 if y%4==0 and not y%400==0 else 28,31,30,31,30,31,31,30,31,30,31][m-1])
    return date.replace(day=d,month=m, year=y)

>>> for m in range(-12, 12):
    print(monthdelta(datetime.now(), m))


2009-08-06 16:12:27.823000
2009-09-06 16:12:27.855000
2009-10-06 16:12:27.870000
2009-11-06 16:12:27.870000
2009-12-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-01-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-02-06 16:12:27.870000
2010-03-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-04-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-05-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-06-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-07-06 16:12:27.886000
2010-08-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-09-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-10-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-11-06 16:12:27.901000
2010-12-06 16:12:27.901000
2011-01-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-02-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-03-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-04-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-05-06 16:12:27.917000
2011-06-06 16:12:27.933000
2011-07-06 16:12:27.933000
>>> monthdelta(datetime(2010,3,30), -1)
datetime.datetime(2010, 2, 28, 0, 0)
>>> monthdelta(datetime(2008,3,30), -1)
datetime.datetime(2008, 2, 29, 0, 0)

Edit Corrected to handle the day as well.

Answer 4

Here is some code to do just that. Haven't tried it out myself...

def add_one_month(t):
    """Return a `datetime.date` or `datetime.datetime` (as given) that is
    one month earlier.

    Note that the resultant day of the month might change if the following
    month has fewer days:

        >>> add_one_month(datetime.date(2010, 1, 31))
        datetime.date(2010, 2, 28)
    """
    import datetime
    one_day = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
    one_month_later = t + one_day
    while one_month_later.month == t.month:  # advance to start of next month
        one_month_later += one_day
    target_month = one_month_later.month
    while one_month_later.day < t.day:  # advance to appropriate day
        one_month_later += one_day
        if one_month_later.month != target_month:  # gone too far
            one_month_later -= one_day
            break
    return one_month_later

def subtract_one_month(t):
    """Return a `datetime.date` or `datetime.datetime` (as given) that is
    one month later.

    Note that the resultant day of the month might change if the following
    month has fewer days:

        >>> subtract_one_month(datetime.date(2010, 3, 31))
        datetime.date(2010, 2, 28)
    """
    import datetime
    one_day = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
    one_month_earlier = t - one_day
    while one_month_earlier.month == t.month or one_month_earlier.day > t.day:
        one_month_earlier -= one_day
    return one_month_earlier

Answer 5

Given a (year,month) tuple, where month goes from 1-12, try this:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> today = datetime.today()
>>> today
datetime.datetime(2010, 8, 6, 10, 15, 21, 310000)
>>> thismonth = today.year, today.month
>>> thismonth
(2010, 8)
>>> lastmonth = lambda (yr,mo): [(y,m+1) for y,m in (divmod((yr*12+mo-2), 12),)][0]
>>> lastmonth(thismonth)
(2010, 7)
>>> lastmonth( (2010,1) )
(2009, 12)

Assumes there are 12 months in every year.