So, I was preparing my clases for the upcoming semester and I wanted to produce an outline of the lectures with the corresponding date and topic. For instance I have a class that’s once a week every Friday. I could look up the calendar and write every date, which is what I initially did. But then I though, I could write a script for this. And that’s when I entered the rabbit hole.¹

The script I’m showing here went through several iterations. I had several difficulties until I got it to work. I wasn’t pleased with it, so I fiddled a bit more. Later when I saw Dr Drang’s post about formatting multimarkdown tables with tabulate, I knew I had to use that. So I did. Here’s the script.

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import calendar
from tabulate import tabulate

c = calendar.Calendar(firstweekday=calendar.MONDAY)

year = 2016
months = [2,3,4,5]
monthName = {k: v for k,v in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr)}

listFridays = []
for month in months:

    monthcal = c.monthdatescalendar(year,month)

    for week in monthcal:
        for day in week:
            if day.weekday() == calendar.FRIDAY and day.month == month:
                listFridays.append([monthName[day.month]+" "+str(day.day)," "," "])

headers = ["Date","Lecture","Lecture Topics"]

print tabulate(listFridays,headers,tablefmt='pipe')

As you can see, the script is quite simple. I give it the year and the months. The loops go over the months, and then the weeks and it looks up the friday of that week. On line 18, I have to append the white spaces " " and convert day to str in order to get three columns per day, so that tabulate gives me back a nifty formatted table. Another cool thing is that tabulate can also output in LaTeX format.

The script will produce this:

| Date   | Lecture   | Lecture Topics   |
|:-------|:----------|:-----------------|
| Feb 5  |           |                  |
| Feb 12 |           |                  |
| Feb 19 |           |                  |
| Feb 26 |           |                  |
| Mar 4  |           |                  |
| Mar 11 |           |                  |
| Mar 18 |           |                  |
| Mar 25 |           |                  |
| Apr 1  |           |                  |
| Apr 8  |           |                  |
| Apr 15 |           |                  |
| Apr 22 |           |                  |
| Apr 29 |           |                  |
| May 6  |           |                  |
| May 13 |           |                  |
| May 20 |           |                  |
| May 27 |           |                  |

As you can see it works. However, by now you’re wondering, but what about holidays. The script should be smart enough to exclude holidays. I am implementing this, but I’ll leave it for a future post. When rendered looks something like this: