Generating all dates within a given range in python

Question

I have two string variables which contain dates in yyyy-mm-dd format as follows :

date1 = \'2011-05-03\'
date2 = \'2011-05-10\'

I want to write

Answer 1

Dates can be compared to each other just like numbers, and you can do date-related math with the datetime.timedelta object. There's no reason to use dateutil here, and there's no reason to hard-code the number of iterations a la 'range(9)'. This really becomes similar to how you'd deal with plain old numbers.

>>> import datetime
>>> date1 = '2011-05-03'
>>> date2 = '2011-05-10'
>>> start = datetime.datetime.strptime(date1, '%Y-%m-%d')
>>> end = datetime.datetime.strptime(date2, '%Y-%m-%d')
>>> step = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
>>> while start <= end:
...     print start.date()
...     start += step
... 
2011-05-03
2011-05-04
2011-05-05
2011-05-06
2011-05-07
2011-05-08
2011-05-09
2011-05-10
>>>