In this article, we will discuss how to get the difference between two dates in months in python.
In python, the dateutil module provides a class relativedelta, which represents an interval of time. The relativedelta class has following attributes which tells about the duration,
- Year
- Month
- Day
- Hours
- Minutes
- Seconds
- Microseconds
So, to calculate the difference between two dates in years, we can create a relativedelta object, that represents the interval between two given dates. Then we can fetch the Years and Month attributes of object (like relativedelta.months + relativedelta.years * 12). It will tell us the difference between two dates in Months. Let’s understand with some examples,
Python Example 1: Get difference between two dates in months
Suppose we have two dates in string format. We can convert them to datetime objects using datetime.strptime() function. Then we will get the interval between two dates as a relativedelta object. Then using the years and months property of relativedelta object, we will fetch the years in between the two dates. For example,
from datetime import datetime from dateutil import relativedelta date_1 = '2/7/2021' date_2 = '24/3/2032' start = datetime.strptime(date_1, "%d/%m/%Y") end = datetime.strptime(date_2, "%d/%m/%Y") # Get the interval between two dates diff = relativedelta.relativedelta(end, start) diff_in_months = diff.months + diff.years * 12 print('Difference between dates in months:') print(diff_in_months)
Output:
Difference between dates in months: 128
Python Example 2: Get difference between two dates in months
Instead of calculating the difference between two datetime objects using relativedelta. We can manually calculate the difference in months. For example,
from datetime import datetime date_1 = '2/7/2021' date_2 = '24/3/2032' start = datetime.strptime(date_1, "%d/%m/%Y") end = datetime.strptime(date_2, "%d/%m/%Y") diff = (end.year - start.year) * 12 + (end.month - start.month ) print('Difference between dates in months:') print(diff)
Output:
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Difference between dates in months: 128
Because we are interested till months only, so it is a quicker solution as compared to previous one.
Python Example 3: Get difference between two dates in months
If you have some existing datetime objects instead of string then we can get the difference between those two datetime objects in months like this,
from datetime import datetime start = datetime(2021, 7, 2) end = datetime(2032, 11, 24) diff = (end.year - start.year) * 12 + (end.month - start.month ) print('Difference between dates in months:') print(diff)
Output:
Difference between dates in months: 136
Summary:
We learned that, in python how to get the difference between two dates in months.