How to find the last Saturday of the month in Pyhton

In this tutorial, we will talk about How to find the last Saturday or any other day of the month in Python. So in order to understand this tutorial first, we need to understand about Calendar. As already told on my previous blog you can visit in order to understand basic calendar functions. Here’s the link https://www.codespeedy.com/find-first-sunday-of-the-month-in-python

Datetime class

Datetime is an object so when you try to change them it doesn’t change  string. Whenever you need to change date and time you are suppose to import datetime fucntion .

Types of date time

• date – Use to find dates (Month,day,year)
• time – Use to find time (Hour,Minute,second)
• datetime –  Combination of both date and time
• tzinfo – An abstract class which deals with time zone
• timedelta – It is use to  manipulate date and time

Basic calendar code

How to find current date and time 

import time 
import datetime
print("Current date and time is: " ,datetime.datetime.now())

Output:
Current date and time is: 2019-07-07 18:10:54 

To find Current year

import time 
import datetime
print("Current year is:" datetime.date.today().strftime("%Y"))

Output:
Current year is : 2019

How to find Last Saturday of the month in Python

 

from datetime import date
from datetime import timedelta
today = date.today()
offset = (today.weekday() - 5)%7
last_saturday = today - timedelta(days=offset)
print(last_saturday)

Output:
2019-07-06

As written in the above code in order to manipulate date and time we need to import datetime function. Timedelta function being import from datetime fucntion so that it can also be used to show future or previous dates in the calendar. This code is easily changeable and can be used to find out any day by changing number of days in line number 4. for example if you want to find last Wednesday just change 5 to 2 (Monday – 0, Sunday – 6).

 

2 responses to “How to find the last Saturday of the month in Pyhton”

1. Lucas says:

   November 20, 2021 at 4:50 am

   Hi!

   First of all thank you for sharing your code!

   I used it to automate a spreadsheet and found out that if you run the algorithm on a Saturday trying to find last Saturday it returns the current day. So the way I solved it was running it like this:

   today = date.today()

   for i in range(0, 7):
   if today.weekday() == i:
   offset = i + 2

   last_saturday = today – timedelta(days = offset)

   This is for finding Saturday, but you can change the ‘offset’ according to the day you would like to find. For last Friday, for example, offset should be i + 3.

   I wanted to share this because it took me a minute figuring it out and this might save other people some time. I also never really understood the whole ‘%7’ command. At first I thought if the offset for finding last saturday was offset = (today.weekday() – 5)%7 then for finding last friday it would be something like offset = (today.weekday() – 6)%7. Anyway… I hope this helps.

   Lucas

   Reply
   • Saruque Ahamed Mollick says:

     November 20, 2021 at 9:28 am

     Thanks for the time to share your thoughts.

     Reply