Generate a random date between two other dates

Question

How would I generate a random date that has to be between two other given dates?

The function's signature should something like this:

randomDate("1/1/2008 1:30 PM", "1/1/2009 4:50 AM", 0.34)
                  ^                       ^          ^

           date generated has   date generated has a random number
           to be after this     to be before this

and would return a date such as: 2/4/2008 7:20 PM

Answer 1

The easiest way of doing this is to convert both numbers to timestamps, then set these as the minimum and maximum bounds on a random number generator.

A quick PHP example would be:

// Find a randomDate between $start_date and $end_date
function randomDate($start_date, $end_date)
{
    // Convert to timetamps
    $min = strtotime($start_date);
    $max = strtotime($end_date);

    // Generate random number using above bounds
    $val = rand($min, $max);

    // Convert back to desired date format
    return date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $val);
}

This function makes use of strtotime() to convert a datetime description into a Unix timestamp, and date() to make a valid date out of the random timestamp which has been generated.

Answer 2

This is a different approach - that sort of works..

from random import randint
import datetime

date=datetime.date(randint(2005,2025), randint(1,12),randint(1,28))

BETTER APPROACH

startdate=datetime.date(YYYY,MM,DD)
date=startdate+datetime.timedelta(randint(1,365))

Answer 3

You can Use Mixer,

pip install mixer

and,

from mixer import generators as gen
print gen.get_datetime(min_datetime=(1900, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0), max_datetime=(2020, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59))

Answer 4

start_timestamp = time.mktime(time.strptime('Jun 1 2010  01:33:00', '%b %d %Y %I:%M:%S'))
end_timestamp = time.mktime(time.strptime('Jun 1 2017  12:33:00', '%b %d %Y %I:%M:%S'))
time.strftime('%b %d %Y %I:%M:%S',time.localtime(randrange(start_timestamp,end_timestamp)))

refer

Answer 5

I made this for another project using random and time. I used a general format from time you can view the documentation here for the first argument in strftime(). The second part is a random.randrange function. It returns an integer between the arguments. Change it to the ranges that match the strings you would like. You must have nice arguments in the tuple of the second arugment.

import time
import random


def get_random_date():
    return strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",(random.randrange(2000,2016),random.randrange(1,12),
    random.randrange(1,28),random.randrange(1,24),random.randrange(1,60),random.randrange(1,60),random.randrange(1,7),random.randrange(0,366),1))