Dates appearing in list as datetime.date(YYYY,M,D)

I have a script that is printing the dates at a certain interval between a start date and an end date that is specified by the user. The dates are being printed in the format YYYY-MM-DD as in 2023-06-08. This is the format I like.

In addition to printing the dates, I added some code that is appending these dates to a list. However, when I run this code, the same dates are being entered into the list as [datetime.date(2023,6,1)]. Is there a way around this?

sections = []
#year month day format
barstartdate = datetime.date(int(startyear),int(startmonth),int(startday))
#year month day format
barenddate = datetime.date(int(endyear),int(endmonth),int(endday))
#delta time
delta = datetime.timedelta(days=7)
#iterate over range of dates
while (barstartdate <= barenddate):
    print(barstartdate, end="\n")
    sections.append(barstartdate)
    barstartdate += delta
print(sections)

Output:

2023-06-01
2023-06-08
[datetime.date(2023, 6, 1), datetime.date(2023, 6, 8)]

For reference, the start date and stop date in this case was 2023-06-01 and 2023-06-14. The last bit of code shown is the output I am getting in my console. The first two dates are appearing as I want them to, but the list has an odd format. How do I fix this?

When you print an object it will convert the object to a string using the str() built-in. However, when you print a list, the objects inside the list will be converted using repr().

For many classes str() and repr() will return the same string, but not for date objects:

>>> str(datetime.date.today())
'2023-06-15'
>>> repr(datetime.date.today())
'datetime.date(2023, 6, 15)'

What you are seeing in the list is the string representation of a datetime.date instance. You need to convert them to strings using .strftime("%Y-%m-%d") or, in your case, using the shortcut method .isoformat().

Try replacing

sections.append(barstartdate)

with

sections.append(barstartdate.isoformat())

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