Transform month abbreviation strings to date in python-CodePudding

I have a list with abbreviated month names

shortmonth = ['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec']

And I want to make each element as a date format in year 2020, so each element will be in the form of

'2020-01-01'

As a date and not a simple string. I am very new to python, if anyone could explain me how to do this.

CodePudding user response：

You can use range() to generate the month numbers; the shortmonth list is not necessary. You can do the following:

print(['2020-{0:02d}-01'.format(i) for i in range(1, 13)])

If you want to create datetime objects, you can do the following:

from datetime import datetime
print([datetime.strptime('2020-{0:02d}-01'.format(i), "%Y-%m-%d") for i in range(1, 13)])

CodePudding user response：

If you want to use datetime.datetime or datetime.date objects, and assuming you want all the months in order, you can skip the month abbreviation strings and do something like:

month_starts = [
    datetime.date(year=2020, month=month, day=1)
    for month in range(1, 13)
]

month_starts = [
    datetime.datetime(year=2020, month=month, day=1)
    for month in range(1, 13)
]

If you do need to work with the month abbreviation strings, you can do something like:

month_abbr = 'Apr'  # coming from a file, input or from elsewhere in the program

month_number = shortmonth.index(month_abbr)   1
the_month_start = datetime.date(year=2020, month=month_number, day=1)