Loop through dates except for weekends

Question

So I have a script that has date arguments for different functions and I want it to loop through 01-01-2012 to 06-09-2012 not including weekends. I

Answer 1

@brandizzi's answer is more syntactically aesthetic but as an alternative you can use the following

start = datetime(2012, 1, 1)
end = datetime(2012, 10, 6)
delta = timedelta(days=1)
d = start
diff = 0
SATURDAY = 5
while d <= end:
    if d.weekday() < SATURDAY:
        diff += 1
        d += delta

Answer 2

Use the datetime.weekday() method. It returns values between zero and six, related to the weekdays. Saturday value is 5 and Sunday value is 6; so, if you skip the operation when these values appear, you skip weekdends:

start = datetime(2012, 1, 1)
end = datetime(2012, 10, 6)
delta = timedelta(days=1)
d = start
diff = 0
weekend = set([5, 6])
while d <= end:
    if d.weekday() not in weekend:
        diff += 1
    d += delta

Answer 3

There is easier way to do this using freq = 'B' for business day frequency.

import pandas as pd
dt = pd.date_range(start=datetime.date.today(), periods=10, freq='B')
dt

which gives you :

DatetimeIndex(['2018-08-13', '2018-08-14', '2018-08-15', '2018-08-16',
               '2018-08-17', '2018-08-20', '2018-08-21', '2018-08-22',
               '2018-08-23', '2018-08-24'],
              dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq='B')

you check name of day also by:

dt.weekday_name

Index(['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Monday',
       'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday'],
      dtype='object')