Getting the closest date to a given date

Question

Given this base date:

base_date = \"10/29 06:58 AM\"

I want to find a tuple within the list that contains the closest date to the bas

Answer 1

This can be done using datetime module, which is able to parse date string into datetime object, which supports comparison and arithmetic with dates:

from datetime import datetime

# function for parsing strings using specific format
get_datetime = lambda s: datetime.strptime(s, "%m/%d %I:%M %p")

base = get_datetime(base_date)
later = filter(lambda d: get_datetime(d[0]) > base, list_date)
closest_date = min(later, key = lambda d: get_datetime(d[0]))