Hours, days and weeks with Python
Posted by Abhishek Pednekar in Python
Python does not have a built-in function to directly compute the number of hours, days or weeks between two given datetime values. This article will show how we can use the timedelta class of python's datetime module to do exactly that.
A rather obvious way to compute the number of days (for example) between two dates is to use total_seconds().
import datetime as dt
yesterday = dt.datetime(2022, 4, 18, 22, 0, 0, 0)
today = dt.datetime(2022, 4, 19, 22, 0, 0, 0)
difference = today - yesterday # Returns datetime.timedelta(days=1)
days = difference.total_seconds() / 24 / 60 / 60
print(int(days)) # Returns 1
Python does have a non-obvious way to do this by dividing the difference between the datetime values with the timedelta.
import datetime as dt
today = dt.datetime(2022, 4, 19, 22, 0, 0, 0)
week_from_today = dt.datetime(2022, 4, 26, 22, 0, 0, 0)
diff = week_from_today - today
Total hours
total_hours = int(diff/dt.timedelta(hours=1)) # Returns 168 (24 * 7)
Total days
total_days = int(diff/dt.timedelta(days=1)) # Returns 7
Total weeks
total_weeks = int(diff/dt.timedelta(weeks=1)) # Returns 1
For an in-depth look at python's datetime module, check out Working with date and time in Python.
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