python - Return datetime object of previous month

Question

If only timedelta had a month argument in it's constructor. So what's the simplest way to do this?

EDIT: I wasn't thinking too hard about this as was pointed out below. Really what I wanted was any day in the last month because eventually I'm going to grab the year and month only. So given a datetime object, what's the simplest way to return any datetime object that falls in the previous month?

Answer 1

You can use the third party dateutil module (PyPI entry here).

import datetime
import dateutil.relativedelta

d = datetime.datetime.strptime("2013-03-31", "%Y-%m-%d")
d2 = d - dateutil.relativedelta.relativedelta(months=1)
print d2

output:

2013-02-28 00:00:00