[Tutor] date problems

Thu Apr 29 01:59:08 CEST 2010

On 2010-04-28, Eric Meigs <thepond at hughes.net> wrote:
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> I want to create a program to tell me when I am supposed to do things.
> I have a text file with dates like  4-4-2010' as well as other data. I 
> want to read in this date into my code and then compare it with 
> 'date.today()'
> example 'if /variable/ >= today:'
> I don't see how to read in a string and get it into a format for comparison.

So you have two questions here, one "how to read in a string" and two "get it 
into a format for comparison"?

It seems to me you could do something like this:

    from datetime import datetime

    input = open('dates.txt','rb')
    list = input.read()
    dates = list.split()[0] # chars before the first whitespace 
    items = list.split()[-1] # everything after the first whitespace

    if datetime.now().strftime('%m-%d-%Y') == dates:
        print 'Do %s today!' % items

(from http://github.com/aclark4life/Python-Tutor/blob/master/eric-meigs.py)

> I can do all of the other code.
>
> Eric
>
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><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
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><body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
><font size="-1"><font face="Arial">I want to create a program to tell
> me when I am supposed to do things.<br>
> I have a text file with dates like&nbsp; 4-4-2010' as well as other data. I
> want to read in this date into my code and then compare it with
> 'date.today()' <br>
> example 'if <i>variable</i> &gt;= today:' <br>
> I don't see how to read in a string and get it into a format for
> comparison.<br>
><br>
> I can do all of the other code.<br>
><br>
> Eric<br>
></font></font>
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-- 
Alex Clark · http://aclark.net
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