Pass a datetime object to url in django

Question

How can I pass a datetime eg datetime.date(2017, 12, 31) object to a url in django?

My template:

{% for key, value in my_dictionary.items %}
    {{ key.0 }}  # it displays Dec. 31, 2017
    ...
{% endfor %} 

Passing it to the url as:

href="{% url 'my_url:my_date' selected_day=key.0 %}">

My urls.py:

url(r'^my-date/(?P<selected_day>\w+)/$', name='my_date')

Error:

Exception Type: NoReverseMatch
Exception Value: Reverse for 'my_date' with keyword arguments 
'{'selected_day': datetime.date(2017, 12, 31),}'not found. 1 pattern(s) tried: ['my-url/my-date/(?P<selected_day>\\w+)/$']

Answer 1

The group selected_day in your url pattern can only contain word characters \w . That includes digits, but not spaces or dashes.

url(r'^my-date/(?P<selected_day>\w+)/$', name='my_date')

If you use iso8601 date format for your date string, you can use this url pattern.

url(r'^my-date/(?P<selected_day>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/$', name='my_date')

Simply using str(date) on a date object should use iso format by default (YYYY-MM-DD). You can parse the date string to a date object in you view function. But django QuerySets will accept date strings as arguments, so that step might not be needed.

def my_date_view(request, selected_day):
    # this works with either a date object or a iso formatted string.
    queryset = MyModel.objects(published_on=selected_day) 

    # or use strptime to get a date object.
    date = datetime.datetime.strptime(selected_day, '%Y-%M-%d').date()

Django also includes a utility function you can use to parse date strings: django.utils.dateparse.parse_date

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Answer 2

You cant, convert datetime object to string and pass that.

t = datetime.date(2017, 12, 31)
t.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')

This will yield

'02/23/2012'

pass that to your url.

Answer 3

If you are using timezone aware dates (which you should), would be this:

r'^(?P<date_start>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\.\d{3}Z)/'

Example: 2019-07-18T17:12:32.909Z