Python's timedelta: can't I just get in whatever time unit I want the value of the entire difference?

Question

I am trying to have some clever dates since a post has been made on my site (\"seconds since, hours since, weeks since, etc..\") and I\'m using datetime.timedelta difference

Answer 1

It seems that Python 2.7 has introduced a total_seconds() method, which is what you were looking for, I believe!

Answer 2

Like bobince said, you could use timestamps, like this:

# assuming ts1 and ts2 are the two datetime objects
from time import mktime
mktime(ts1.timetuple()) - mktime(ts2.timetuple())

Although I would think this is even uglier than just calculating the seconds from the timedelta object...

Answer 3

You can compute the difference in seconds.

total_seconds = delta.days * 86400 + delta.seconds

No, you're no "missing something". It doesn't provide deltas in seconds.

Answer 4

It would be perfect if I could just get the entire difference in seconds.

Then plain-old-unix-timestamp as provided by the 'time' module may be more to your taste.

I personally have yet to be convinced by a lot of what's in 'datetime'.