Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

Perform the following steps for this recipe:

1. The shiftmonth function will allow us to move our date back and forth by any number of months:

import datetime

def shiftmonth(d, months):
    for _ in range(abs(months)):
        if months > 0:
            d = d.replace(day=5) + datetime.timedelta(days=28)
        else:
            d = d.replace(day=1) - datetime.timedelta(days=1)
    d = d.replace(day=1, hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)
    return d

2. Using it is as simple as just providing the months you want to add or remove:

>>> now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
>>> now
datetime.datetime(2018, 3, 21, 21, 55, 5, 699400)

3. We can use it to go to the next month:

>>> shiftmonth(now, 1)
datetime.datetime(2018, 4, 1, 0, 0)

4. Or back to the previous month:

>>> shiftmonth(now, ...