How do I count the number of messages per day in pycord?

November 21, 2022

So I basicly count all the messages in a channel.
I also want to count the number of messages per day.
I know message.created_at returns a datetime, but how do I count how many times a date is present in this list?

this is my current code:

count = 0
async for message in channel.history(limit=None):
    count += 1
    print(message.created_at)

I tried to do it like this:

count = 0
async for message in channel.history(limit=None):
    count += 1
    dates.append(message.created_at)
print(dates.count(dates[0]))

But this just returns "1" (while there are far more different days in the list)

This is my first post on stack overflow, don’t be toxic please, feedback is welcome!

>Solution :

Your code isn’t counting the number of messages on a certain date, it’s counting the message on a certain datetime.datetime object, which represents a specific point in time (could be down to a microsecond depending on the API precision).

This is because message.created_at returns the time and date of the message, what you want is probably message.created_at.date() (see datetime docs).

If you want to know for each date how many messages there were, you can use a dictionary to count:

messages_per_date = {}  # empty dictionary
async for message in channel.history(limit=None):
    message_date = message.created_at.date()
    # Add the date to the dictionary if necessary
    if message_date not in messages_per_date:
        messages_per_date[message_date] = 0
    # Increment the number of messages on that date
    messages_per_date[message_date] += 1
# Print the number of messages today
print(messages_per_date[datetime.date.today()])

You can use collections.defaultdict to make the code significantly shorter:

import collections

# This creates a dictionary in which the default value is zero
messages_per_date = collections.defaultdict(int)

async for message in channel.history(limit=None):
    # Now the values can be incremented without checking the key
    messages_per_date[message.created_at.date()] += 1

print(messages_per_date[datetime.date.today()])