Finding specific date ranges

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On Sep 6, 2:39 pm, Tim Golden <t... at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
>
> > Anyway, your method is probably clearer to read whereas mine
>
>  > doesn't require anything to be imported.
>
> I think I've been a SQL & Python programmer for so long that
> I tend to do anything -- and sometimes too much -- to avoid
> messy loop/exit-when structures. On reflection, my code
> would be simplified by ignoring all the datetime.date stuff
> which is irrelevant for the purpose, since tuples will
> compare perfectly well. Also, I had to put the conditional
> in the loop because I didn't have data for every month. If
> you *knew* you had at least one period for each month and
> weren't fussed about, say, date arithmetic later on, it
> would be even simpler, just a min () function around
> a generator expression.
>


I'm getting pretty sick of for loops, flags and/or sentinel values. I
do *know* that there should be one (and only one) period per month
that applies. I just have to grab that period. I currently calculate
the date ranges on the fly based on the last date in the 2-value pair.
Ugh.

I've read an re-read about generators, but they seem to cause my mind
to go blank. It's like the related  with statement or decorators. I
just don't understand them well enough to implement them.


> Frankly, though, with code as small scale as this, it's
> far more important what *you* the programmer and any
> future maintainers will find easy to understand and use,
> and far less important how clever the code is or how
> fast it runs.

I agree. The simpler the code is to read and maintain, the better.
Clever, short code may be cool, but it can also be a pain to
troubleshoot.

Mike