Calculating time until 1st or 15th of the month in python

Question

I'm trying to write a little budget program in python. This is my first program I'm writing to learn python. The first step is to calculate how many days until either the 1st or 15th (paydays) depending on today's date. Can someone help me out a little?

Answer 1

Interesting question, and here's a complete solution. I'll start with my function definition, I've put this in a file named payday.py:

def nexypayday(fromdate=None):
    """
    @param fromdate: An instance of datetime.date that is the day to go from. If
                     not specified, todays date is used.
    @return: The first payday on or after the date specified.
    """

Next we need some tests. This is to clearly define the behaviour of our method. Because you're new to python, I'm going to go all out and give you an example of using unittests.

from unittest import TestCase, main
import payday
import datetime

class TestPayday(TestCase):
    def test_first_jan(self):
        self.assertEqual(payday.nextpayday(datetime.date(2010, 1, 1)),
                         datetime.date(2010, 1, 1))

    def test_second_jan(self):
        self.assertEqual(payday.nextpayday(datetime.date(2010, 1, 2)),
                         datetime.date(2010, 1, 15))

    def test_fifteenth_jan(self):
        self.assertEqual(payday.nextpayday(datetime.date(2010, 1, 15)),
                         datetime.date(2010, 1, 15))

    def test_thirty_one_jan(self):
        self.assertEqual(payday.nextpayday(datetime.date(2010, 1, 31)),
                         datetime.date(2010, 2, 1))

    def test_today(self):
        self.assertTrue(payday.nextpayday() >= datetime.date.today())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

This is a runnable python module. You can go ahead and name that test_payday.py and run it with python test_payday.py. This should immediately fail with various error messages because we've not got the right code written yet.

After some fiddling with how datetime.date works, I've worked out: mydatetime.day is the day of the month, mydatetime + datetime.timedelta(days=1) will create a new datetime one day on in the year. Thus I can throw together this in payday.py.

import datetime

def nextpayday(fromdate=None):
    """
    @param fromdate: An instance of datetime.date that is the day to go from. If
                     not specified, todays date is used.
    @return: The first payday on or after the date specified.
    """
    if fromdate is None:
        fromdate = datetime.date.today()

    # while the day of the month isn't 1 or 15, increase the day by 1
    while fromdate.day not in (1, 15):
        fromdate = fromdate + datetime.timedelta(days=1)

    return fromdate

Run the unit tests and it should be all golden. Note that in my tests I've made it that if I check what the 'next' payday is from a payday, it returns its own day. Changing that to returning the 'next' payday is left as an exercise for the reader.

Answer 2

I don't want to entirely spoil your learning experience by just typing the answer, but the Python library makes this quite easy. Have a look at the datetime module, particularly the date and timedelta classes.