I kept getting a Python error for the following line:
month = m[webMonth]
I changed it to month = month_numbers[webMonth]
and that did the trick.
Tim Chase wrote:
> > I am new to Python and am working on my first program. I am trying to
> > compare a date I found on a website to todays date. The problem I have
> > is the website only shows 3 letter month name and the date.
> > Example: Jun 15
>
> No year, right? Are you making the assumption that the year is
> the current year?
>
> > How would I go about comparing that to a different date?
>
> Once you've got them as dates,
>
> >>> from datetime import date
>
> you can just compare them as you would any other comparable items.
>
> If you need to map the month-strings back into actual dates, you
> can use this dictionary:
>
> >>> month_numbers = dict([(date(2006, m, 1).strftime("%b"), m)
> for m in range(1,13)])
>
> It happens to be locale specific, so you might have to tinker a
> bit if you're mapping comes out differently from what the website
> uses. I also made the assumption the case was the same (rather
> than trying to normalize to upper/lower case)
>
> Then, you can use
>
> >>> webpageDateString = "Mar 21"
> >>> webMonth, webDay = webpageDateString.split()
> >>> month = m[webMonth]
> >>> day = int(webDay)
> >>> webpageDate = date(date.today().year, month, day)
> >>> compareDate = date.today()
> >>> compareDate < webpageDate
> False
> >>> compareDate > webpageDate
> True
>
> You can wrap the load in a function, something like
>
> >>> def isNewer(dateString, year = date.today().year):
> ... monthString, dayString = dateString.split()
> ... month = month_numbers[monthString]
> ... day = int(dayString)
> ... return date.today() < date(year, month, day)
>
> which will allow you to do
>
> >>> isNewer("Jul 1")
> True
> >>> isNewer("Apr 1")
> False
>
> and the like.
>
> There's plenty of good stuff in the datetime module.
>
> -tkc
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