Add n business days to a given date ignoring holidays and weekends in python

Skipping weekends would be pretty easy doing something like this:

import datetime
def date_by_adding_business_days(from_date, add_days):
    business_days_to_add = add_days
    current_date = from_date
    while business_days_to_add > 0:
        current_date += datetime.timedelta(days=1)
        weekday = current_date.weekday()
        if weekday >= 5: # sunday = 6
            continue
        business_days_to_add -= 1
    return current_date

#demo:
print '10 business days from today:'
print date_by_adding_business_days(datetime.date.today(), 10)

The problem with holidays is that they vary a lot by country or even by region, religion, etc. You would need a list/set of holidays for your use case and then skip them in a similar way. A starting point may be the calendar feed that Apple publishes for iCal (in the ics format), the one for the US would be http://files.apple.com/calendars/US32Holidays.ics

You could use the icalendar module to parse this.

If you don't mind using a 3rd party library then dateutil is handy

from dateutil.rrule import *
print "In 4 business days, it's", rrule(DAILY, byweekday=(MO,TU,WE,TH,FR))[4]

You can also look at rruleset and using .exdate() to provide the holidays to skip those in the calculation, and optionally there's a cache option to avoid re-calculating that might be worth looking in to.