Calculating the number of business days between dates in Python

Calculating the number of business days between varying lengths of time, even excluding federal holidays, may seem like a tricky problem to solve, but the solution is quite simple. While developing Stockscast, an AI-based stock market forecaster, I came across this issue as I needed to find the number of days the stock exchange would be open throughout the year.

The solution I found involved the use of pandas.tseries.holiday.USFederalHolidayCalendar() and pandas.tseries.offsets.CustomBusinessDay() functions found in the Pandas library. By creating a custom calendar, using the CustomBusinessDay function, with the frequency of USFederalHolidayCalendar, we can create a calendar excluding both weekends and federal holidays.

Next, find the length of time you want to calculate the number of business days in. In my case, I needed to find the number of business days between one week, one month, three months, six months, and one year from now.

Finally, we can utilize our custom calendar to find the number of business days within these periods. By using the pandas.date_range() function, we can find the number of days between our start and end date using a frequency parameter: this would be our business day calendar we declared above. By finding the length of this argument, we can calculate the number of business days present between the start and end dates.

Full code below:

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