Generate a random ISO8601 date with python?

Question

I have seen how to go from ISO formatted date such as 2007-01-14T20:34:22+00:00 , to aa more readble format with python datetime .

Is there an easy way to generate a random ISO8601 date similar to this answer for datetime strings?

Answer 1

I'd suggest using this Faker library.

pip install faker

It's a package that allows you to generate a variety of randomised "fake" data sets. Using Faker below generates a random datetime object which you can then convert to an ISO8601 string format using the datetime.datetime.isoformat method.

import faker

fake = faker.Faker()
rand_date = fake.date_time()  # datetime(2006, 4, 30, 3, 1, 38)
rand_date_iso = rand_date.isoformat()  # '2006-04-30T03:01:38'

Answer 2

1. Decide on which range you want the random dates to fall inside.
2. Calculate the timestamp of those dates (seconds since unix epoch) in start , end integers.
3. Use random.randrange(start, end) to pick a random number between start and end timestamps.
4. Turn this random integer to datetime with datetime.fromtimestamp()
5. Change the datetime to whatever output format you want.

Answer 3

If you wanted to just generate a random date, you could generate it to the correct format of the ISO8601 :

import random

iso_format = "{Year}-{Month}-{Day}T{Hour}:{Minute}+{Offset}"

year_range = [str(i) for i in range(1900, 2014)]
month_range = ["01","02","03","04","05","06","07","08","09","10","11","12"]
day_range = [str(i).zfill(2) for i in range(1,28)]
hour_range = [str(i).zfill(2) for i in range(0,24)]
min_range = [str(i).zfill(2) for i in range(0,60)]
offset = ["00:00"]

argz = {"Year": random.choice(year_range),
        "Month": random.choice(month_range),
        "Day" : random.choice(day_range),
        "Hour": random.choice(hour_range),
        "Minute": random.choice(min_range),
        "Offset": random.choice(offset)
        }

print iso_format.format(**argz)

This would need to be altered if you wanted to make sure the date was valid.