python - Loop through dates except for weekends

Question

So I have a script that has date arguments for different functions and I want it to loop through 01-01-2012 to 06-09-2012 not including weekends. Im trying to figure out a way I can use time delta because my script outputs files with the date used in the name of the file for example:

items = (functions.getItems(item,date)
    print items
    test = sum(abs(l[-1]) for l in items)
    total = open('total' +str(datetime.today- datetime.timedelta(1)),'a')

I want timedelta(1) to cycle through each date so that the output file would have the format of total2012-01-01 for the first day and cycle through until it created the file total2012-06-09. Also the date argument for items has the format of MM-DD-YYYY

I thought that I could do this:

sd = 01-01-2012
ed = 06-09-2012
delta = datetime.timedelta(days=1)
diff = 0
while sd != ed
    # do functions 
    # (have output files (datetime.today - datetime.delta(diff))
    diff +=1
    sd+=delta

So essentially I'm just trying to figure out how can I loop through having the function start with 01-01-2012 and ending with 06-10-2012 excluding weekends. I'm having trouble figuring out how to exclude weekends and how to get it to loop in the proper order

Thanks

Answer 1

Use the datetime.weekday() method. It returns values between zero and six, related to the weekdays. Saturday value is 5 and Sunday value is 6; so, if you skip the operation when these values appear, you skip weekdends:

start = datetime(2012, 1, 1)
end = datetime(2012, 10, 6)
delta = timedelta(days=1)
d = start
diff = 0
weekend = set([5, 6])
while d <= end:
    if d.weekday() not in weekend:
        diff += 1
    d += delta