How to Add a Month to a Date in Python

In this tutorial, we aim to demonstrate how easy it is to add a month to a date in Python. The date and time manipulations are a common task in most programming languages.

Python offers some great resources for date and time manipulations, with the datetime and dateutil libraries being the most commonly used. Here, we will focus on the dateutil library, and specifically, the relativedelta function which makes it easy to perform advanced date operations.

Step 1: Install the Required Libraries

First off, before we start programming we need to ensure that we have all the required libraries installed. For this operation, we require the datetime and dateutil libraries.

The datetime library is built into Python, which means you will not need to install it separately. On the other hand, you might need to install dateutil. Use the following pip command in your command prompt to install it:

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pip install python-dateutil

Step 2: Import the Required Libraries

Next, we need to import the necessary libraries into our script.

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import datetime
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

Step 3: Adding a Month to a Date

We can now proceed to add a month to a date in Python. First, we need to define our date. We can do this by creating a datetime object, and then we simply add a month to it using the relativedelta function.

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# define the date
start_date = datetime.datetime(2022, 1, 25)
 
# add a month to the date
end_date = start_date + relativedelta(months=+1)

To print out the result, you can use the print function.

The Complete Code

Here is the full code, including the output.

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import datetime
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta
 
# define the date
start_date = datetime.datetime(2022, 1, 25)
 
# add a month to the date
end_date = start_date + relativedelta(months=+1)
 
print(end_date)

Output:

2022-02-25 00:00:00

Conclusion

To conclude, the Python date and time libraries make it fairly easy to perform date manipulations such as adding a month to a date. The dateutil library is particularly useful for performing advanced date calculations, as shown in this tutorial.

This is just one small part of what you can do with these libraries. Explore these libraries further to uncover even more capabilities.