How do I check the difference, in seconds, between two dates?

There has to be an easier way to do this. I have objects that want to be refreshed every so often, so I want to record when they were created, check against the current timestamp, and refresh as necessary.

datetime.datetime has proven to be difficult, and I don't want to dive into the ctime library. Is there anything easier for this sort of thing?

Solution 1:

if you want to compute differences between two known dates, use total_seconds like this:

import datetime as dt

a = dt.datetime(2013,12,30,23,59,59)
b = dt.datetime(2013,12,31,23,59,59)

(b-a).total_seconds()

86400.0

#note that seconds doesn't give you what you want:
(b-a).seconds

0

Solution 2:

import time  
current = time.time()

...job...
end = time.time()
diff = end - current

would that work for you?

Solution 3:

>>> from datetime import datetime

>>>  a = datetime.now()

# wait a bit 
>>> b = datetime.now()

>>> d = b - a # yields a timedelta object
>>> d.seconds
7

(7 will be whatever amount of time you waited a bit above)

I find datetime.datetime to be fairly useful, so if there's a complicated or awkward scenario that you've encountered, please let us know.

EDIT: Thanks to @WoLpH for pointing out that one is not always necessarily looking to refresh so frequently that the datetimes will be close together. By accounting for the days in the delta, you can handle longer timestamp discrepancies:

>>> a = datetime(2010, 12, 5)
>>> b = datetime(2010, 12, 7)
>>> d = b - a
>>> d.seconds
0
>>> d.days
2
>>> d.seconds + d.days * 86400
172800

Solution 4:

We have function total_seconds() with Python 2.7 Please see below code for python 2.6

import datetime
import time  

def diffdates(d1, d2):
    #Date format: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S
    return (time.mktime(time.strptime(d2,"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")) -
               time.mktime(time.strptime(d1, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")))

d1 = datetime.now()
d2 = datetime.now() + timedelta(days=1)
diff = diffdates(d1, d2)