How to sort dates from a list using Python

Question

This list is organized by day.month.year. Before my list was a prefix. For example: [Objname].01.02.2020.log. I used a regex (\[Obj.*]).(\d{2}.\d{2}.\d{4}) for splitting the ObjectName from date. This is the resulted:

I used sorted() because the Objectname is composite by numbers and I needed return this files sorted. But I don't know how is the best way to handle with this.

def getFiles(numbers):
 currentDay = datetime.datetime.now()
 numdays  = numbers
 dateList = []
 for x in range (0, numdays):
  date = currentDay - datetime.timedelta(days = x)
  days = date.strftime("%d.%m.%Y")
  dateList.append(days)

 path = "/var/log/"

 files = sorted([filename for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path)
          for filename in files
          for date in dateList
          if filename.endswith(date+".log")])

 return files

kaya3 · Accepted Answer

Your dates are in dd.mm.yyyy order, and you want to sort them in yyyy.mm.dd order; so you can use a key function which splits on . and reverses the components.

>>> date_strings = ['01.01.2009', '04.07.2007', '05.06.2007', '06.06.2007']
>>> sorted(date_strings, key=lambda d: d.split('.')[::-1])
['05.06.2007', '06.06.2007', '04.07.2007', '01.01.2009']

How to sort dates from a list using Python

Answers (2)

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