Pandas ENH date_range should accept dateutil frequency constants

Currently date_range accepts string flags for freq=.

dateutil (which is already a pandas dependency) has constants for YEARLY, MONTHLY, WEEKLY, DAILY, HOURLY, MINUTELY, SECONDLY which are used in the dateutil equivalent of date_range, rrule.

it would be a nice feature if these were accepted as well as the string arguments

Comment From: jcontesti

I start to prepare a PR for this enhancement.

Comment From: jorisvandenbossche

@mangecoeur since those constants are actually just ints, that means we would effectively also accept ints (of the appropriate range). I am not sure we should do that.

Do you have a good use case for this?

Comment From: mangecoeur

@jorisvandenbossche mainly for consistency between using dateutil directly and using it via pandas. I don't think them being ints under the hood is such a big issue (although maybe one day everything will use proper Enums). Anyway, as far as i'm concerned its a nice to have.

Comment From: fpunny

take

Comment From: MarcoGorelli

closing due to lack of interest/activity, but thanks for the suggestion!