Add days to dates in Python

In this example, we’ll see how to add days to dates in python.

To add days to a date in python, you simply need to use the timedelta() class that you should import from the datetime module.

For example:

dateplustwo = aDate + timedelta(days=2). 

We passed a days argument to the timedelta class and added two days to the date.

Here is the complete working example:

>>> from datetime import datetime, date, timedelta
>>> today = datetime.today()
>>> print(today + timedelta(days=1))
2022-09-30 20:42:58.812066

The datetime.today() method returns the current local datetime.

This can also be used with date instead of datetime as follows:

>>> today  = date.today()
>>> print(today + timedelta(days=3))
2022-10-02

The date.today method returns a date object that represents the current local date.

Don’t forget to import the datetime or date and timedelta classes from the datetime module.

We can also use a date string but we first need to convert it a datetime object before adding days to it. Here is a working example:

>>> today = '2022-09-29' # format: yyyy-mm-dd
>>> datetime.strptime(today, '%Y-%m-%d')
datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 29, 0, 0)
>>> print(today)
2022-09-29
>>> myday = datetime.strptime(today, '%Y-%m-%d')
>>> print(myday + timedelta(days=2))
2022-10-01 00:00:00

The datetime.timedelta class takes the days we need to add to the date or datetime objects.

We formatted the date string as yyyy-mm-dd and we used the strptime() method to convert the string to a datetime object, corresponding to the provided format, that we can use with the timedelta() class.

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