How can I get the day of the week given a date in Python?

General Discussions
1

How can I get the day of the week given a date in Python?

I want to determine the corresponding day of the week for a given date (as a datetime object). For instance, Sunday is the first day, Monday is the second day, and so on. How can I implement this?

For example, if today’s date is passed in:

>>> today = datetime.datetime(2017, 10, 20)
>>> today.get_weekday()  # what I'm looking for

The output might be 6 since it’s Friday.

How can I implement this in Python for day of week?

2

The weekday() method returns an integer where Monday is 0 and Sunday is 6. This can be used to get the day of the week.

import datetime
today = datetime.datetime(2017, 10, 20)
day_of_week = today.weekday()  # Returns 4 (Friday)
print(day_of_week)
3

The calendar module also provides a weekday() function that behaves similarly to datetime.weekday(). It returns the day of the week as an integer, with Monday being 0 and Sunday being 6.

import calendar
import datetime
today = datetime.datetime(2017, 10, 20)
day_of_week = calendar.weekday(today.year, today.month, today.day)  # Returns 4 (Friday)
print(day_of_week)
4

If you’d like the name of the day instead of the number, you can use the strftime() method to format the date as a string representing the day of the week.

import datetime
today = datetime.datetime(2017, 10, 20)
day_of_week = today.strftime('%A')  # Returns 'Friday'
print(day_of_week)