How to retrieve the date from today excluding weekends with datetime or pandas in Python

Question

I want to create a function that takes in a number and returns the {number} days prior to today, excluding weekends.

For example,

from datetime import date, timedelta

def get_date(days = 5):
    today = date.today()
    return today - timedelta(days)

when today is 2020-06-11, it should output 2020-06-04 (excluding 06-06 and 06-07).

Answer 1

Using only Python's built-in libraries:

from datetime import date, timedelta

def get_date(days = 5):
    today = date.today()
    if days == 0:
        return today

    retval = today
    while days > 0:
        retval -= timedelta(days=1)
        if retval.weekday() not in [5,6]:
            days -= 1
    return retval