How can I check if a date is the same day as datetime.today()?

Question:

This condition always evaluates to True even if it’s the same day because it is comparing time.

from datetime import datetime

# ...

if date_num_posts < datetime.today():

How can I check if a date is the same day as datetime.today()?

Asked By: madprops

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Answers:

If you need to compare only day of month value than you can use the following code:
```
if yourdate.day == datetime.today().day:
    # do something
```
If you need to check that the difference between two dates is acceptable then you can use
timedelta:
```
if (datetime.today() - yourdate).days == 0:
    #do something
```

And if you want to compare date part only than you can simply use:

from datetime import datetime, date
if yourdatetime.date() < datetime.today().date()
    # do something

Note that timedelta has the following format:

datetime.timedelta([days[, seconds[, microseconds[, milliseconds[, minutes[, hours[, weeks]]]]]]])

So you are able to check diff in days, seconds, msec, minutes and so on depending on what you really need:

from datetime import datetime
if (datetime.today() - yourdate).days == 0:
    #do something

In your case when you need to check that two dates are exactly the same you can use timedelta(0):

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
if (datetime.today() - yourdate) == timedelta(0):
    #do something

Answered By: Artsiom Rudzenka

If you want to just compare dates,

yourdatetime.date() < datetime.today().date()

Or, obviously,

yourdatetime.date() == datetime.today().date()

If you want to check that they’re the same date.

The documentation is usually helpful. It is also usually the first google result for python thing_i_have_a_question_about. Unless your question is about a function/module named “snake”.

Basically, the datetime module has three types for storing a point in time:

date for year, month, day of month
time for hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, time zone info
datetime combines date and time. It has the methods date() and time() to get the corresponding date and time objects, and there’s a handy combine function to combine date and time into a datetime.

Answered By: trutheality

You can set the hours, minutes, seconds and microseconds to whatever you like

datetime.datetime.today().replace(hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)

but trutheality’s answer is probably best when they are all to be zero and you can just compare the .date()s of the times

Maybe it is faster though if you have to compare hundreds of datetimes because you only need to do the replace() once vs hundreds of calls to date()

Answered By: John La Rooy

all(getattr(someTime,x)==getattr(today(),x) for x in ['year','month','day'])

One should compare using .date(), but I leave this method as an example in case one wanted to, for example, compare things by month or by minute, etc.

Answered By: ninjagecko

Another alternative is to convert the date in strings and compare them.

from datetime import datetime

today= datetime.today()

if today.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') == other_datetime.strftime('%Y-%m-%d'):
    print("same day as today: {0}".format(today.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')))

Answered By: Papouche Guinslyzinho