title: Checking for part of a key value pair
body: <p>I am currently trying to develop an app that displays the parking tickets in NYC. The API I am using is <a href="https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/ati4-9cgt.json" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/ati4-9cgt.json</a>. I am trying to create a graph in which it shows how many tickets were distributed per month. There is a column called "issue_date", and it has year, month, followed by a bunch of numbers I am unsure of. Is it possible to only check the year and month part, instead of the whole value? For example, if I only want to see if the ticket was issued in January, I would check for 2017-01, but how would I make it so that the rest of the value doesn't get accounted and break the code? Thank you!</p>
  
  <p>I forgot to include that I am a first year in college. I have limited knowledge on programming, sorry for the inconvenience.</p>