How to get the last day of the month?

Question

Is there a way using Python\'s standard library to easily determine (i.e. one function call) the last day of a given month?

If the standard library doesn\'t support

Answer 1

The easiest way (without having to import calendar), is to get the first day of the next month, and then subtract a day from it.

import datetime as dt
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

thisDate = dt.datetime(2017, 11, 17)

last_day_of_the_month = dt.datetime(thisDate.year, (thisDate + relativedelta(months=1)).month, 1) - dt.timedelta(days=1)
print last_day_of_the_month

Output:

datetime.datetime(2017, 11, 30, 0, 0)

---

PS: This code runs faster as compared to the import calendarapproach; see below:

import datetime as dt
import calendar
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

someDates = [dt.datetime.today() - dt.timedelta(days=x) for x in range(0, 10000)]

start1 = dt.datetime.now()
for thisDate in someDates:
    lastDay = dt.datetime(thisDate.year, (thisDate + relativedelta(months=1)).month, 1) - dt.timedelta(days=1)

print ('Time Spent= ', dt.datetime.now() - start1)


start2 = dt.datetime.now()
for thisDate in someDates:
    lastDay = dt.datetime(thisDate.year, 
                          thisDate.month, 
                          calendar.monthrange(thisDate.year, thisDate.month)[1])

print ('Time Spent= ', dt.datetime.now() - start2)

OUTPUT:

Time Spent=  0:00:00.097814
Time Spent=  0:00:00.109791

This code assumes that you want the date of the last day of the month (i.e., not just the DD part, but the entire YYYYMMDD date)