By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have learned:
how to use Python’s datetime module to work with dates and time, what timedelta objects are, and how they’re useful, and calculate the time difference between any two timestamps—in hours, minutes, and seconds.
Let’s get started.
How to use Python’s datetime module
To work with dates and times in Python, you’ll use the datetime module. The datetime module is part of the Python standard library. So you can go ahead and import it into your working environment right away, like this: In order to calculate the time difference, you need to create two different timestamps. You can choose to create:
two date objects, two time objects, or a combination of both date and time—datetime objects.
How to create a date object in Python
Let’s import the date class from datetime module. To create a date object in Python, you can use the general syntax datetime.date(
How to create a time object in Python
To create a time object, let’s import the time class. Any Python time object can be created using the time class by specifying the following class attributes: hour, minute, second, and microsecond. However, all of these attributes are optional. If you don’t specify a certain attribute, say, second, it’s set to 0 by default. The following code snippet shows how you can create a time object time1. As with the date object, you can print out the time object to see the formatted time.
How to create a datetime object in Python
As you can see, the date object has no information about the time. And the time object doesn’t contain information about the date. However, in practice, you’ll need both the date and time information. So it’s recommended to use the datetime class instead. You can access the datetime class and create datetime objects in Python, as shown below: Let’s now create another datetime object dt2 without the second attribute. You can see that it’s set to 0 – the default value. So far you’ve learned how to create timestamps in Python—as dates, times, and datetimes. It’s now time to see how you can calculate the difference between any two timestamps. Head over to the next section to find out.
How to use timedelta object in Python
In Python, timedelta denotes a span of time. It’s the difference between two date, time, or datetime objects. If you add or subtract two date, time, or datetime objects, you’ll get a timedelta object. This timedelta object has useful attributes and methods that can help calculate the time difference. Let’s go ahead and calculate the difference between the two datetime objects dt1 and dt2. From the above code snippet, you can see that the tdelta variable holds the time difference between dt1 and dt2. And the type of tdelta is verified to be of the class timedelta using Python’s built-in type() function. Now let’s code another example.
How to find time difference between two dates
Let’s take a simple yet interesting example. As a first step, let’s create two datetime objects:
one for today, let’s call it today, and another for your birthday, let’s call it bday
The datetime class has the now() method that gives you the current local date and time. So let’s use it get today—our reference date. In the code below, replace bday with your birthday to calculate the time left for your birthday this year. If you’re reading this after your birthday has passed, feel free to set bday to your next birthday. The next step is to calculate time_diff which is a timedleta object, as explained earlier. Simply subtract today from your bday, and you’ll have the time difference. To know the number of days left, use the days attribute on time_diff, as shown:
How to find time difference in seconds
Let’s now calculate how many seconds away your birthday is. To calculate the total time difference in seconds, use the total_seconds() method on the timedelta object time_diff. Well, that’s too long a wait! That said, you now know how to calculate the time difference between any two timestamps in seconds. Let’s now revisit some basics and write down the following. A day is composed of 24 hours, an hour is 60 minutes long, and 60 seconds make up a minute. This is summarized in the image below: So to convert from seconds to minutes, hours and days, you can use the following table, and divide by the corresponding conversion factor. In the next sections, let’s convert the time difference in seconds to minutes and hours.
How to find time difference in minutes
To get the time difference in minutes, you only need to divide the total seconds by 60. Let’s divide tsecs by 60, and store it in a variable called tmins, like this:
How to find time difference in hours
Now that you’ve calculated the time difference in minutes, you can divide that by a factor of 60 to get the difference in hours. Or you could divide the total seconds by 60*60 = 3600. So you’ve now learned how to calculate the time difference in any unit of your choice.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to:
create and work with dates and times using Python’s datetime module, use timedelta objects to get a span of time, or time difference, and calculate the time difference in seconds, minutes, and hours.
Hope you found this tutorial helpful. Now that you know all about calculating time difference in Python, it’s time to put your skills to practice. Happy learning and coding! Learn how to write equal to or not equal to code or make a snake game in python here.
