> 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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