Creating Date Ranges with Pandas

Creating date ranges with Pandas can significantly speed up your workflow when you need to iterate over a number of dates. For example, when we run queries on APIs or databases, we may need to generate a list of dates that can be iterated over. This can be a time-consuming task, but thankfully we can easily accomplish this with Pandas.

If you want to learn more about working with APIs in Python, check out our tutorial on Towards Data Science.

The Pandas Date Range Function

Let’s take a look at the date_range function available in Pandas. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll look at a reduced number of the parameters:

pandas.date_range(start=None, end=None, periods=None, freq=None)

• The start and end parameters look for strings or datetime-like objects.
• The periods parameter identifies the number of periods to generate.
• The frequency parameter identifies the number of periods to generate.

Generating our First Date Range

Let’s say we want to create a list of the first of the month of every month in 2020. We could write the following code:

import pandas as pd
first2020 = pd.date_range(start='2020-01-01', end='2020-12-01', freq='MS')

We use the frequency of MS to signal that we want to return the start of the month. This would generate a list contains the following:

DatetimeIndex (['2020-01-01', '2020-02-01', '2020-03-01', '2020-04-01', '2020-05-01', '2020-06-01', '2020-07-01', '2020-08-01',               '2020-09-01', '2020-10-01', '2020-11-01', '2020-12-01'],             
dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq='MS') 

Each item in this is a datetime object. If we want to generate this into a string, we could iterate over each item:

import pandas as pd
first2020 = pd.date_range(start='2020-01-01', end='2020-12-01', freq='MS')
list2020 = []
for i in first2020:
  list2020.append(i.strftime('%Y-%m-%d'))

This returns a list containing:

['2020-01-01', '2020-02-01', '2020-03-01', '2020-04-01', '2020-05-01', '2020-06-01', '2020-07-01', '2020-08-01', '2020-09-01',
 '2020-10-01', '2020-11-01', '2020-12-01']

Want to learn how to write the for-loop as a list comprehension? Check out our tutorial on list comprehensions.

Some Other Helpful Frequencies

We may want to use some other frequencies:

• B: business day frequency
• D: calendar day frequency
• W: weekly frequency
• M: month-end frequency

Conclusion: Creating Date Ranges with Pandas

In this post we learned how to create handy date ranges with Pandas using Python. It’s a handy and quick way to help create iterable objects for querying APIs and databases. You can learn more about the function by visiting the official documentation.

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