Question

A mysql database table has a column whose datatype is time ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/time.html ). When the table data is accessed, Python returns the value of this column as a datetime.timedelta object. How do I extract the time out of this? (I didn’t really understand what timedelta is for from the python manuals).

E.g. The column in the table contains the value ’18:00:00′ Python-MySQLdb returns this as datetime.timedelta(0, 64800)

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Please ignore what is below (it does return different value) –

Added: Irrespective of the time value in the table, python-MySQLdb seems to only return datetime.timedelta(0, 64800).

Note: I use Python 2.4

Answer 1

It’s strange that Python returns the value as a datetime.timedelta. It probably should return a datetime.time. Anyway, it looks like it’s returning the elapsed time since midnight (assuming the column in the table is 6:00 PM). In order to convert to a datetime.time, you can do the following::

value = datetime.timedelta(0, 64800) (datetime.datetime.min + value).time() 

datetime.datetime.min and datetime.time() are, of course, documented as part of the datetime module if you want more information.

A datetime.timedelta is, by the way, a representation of the difference between two datetime.datetime values. So if you subtract one datetime.datetime from another, you will get a datetime.timedelta. And if you add a datetime.datetime with a datetime.timedelta, you’ll get a datetime.datetime. That’s how the code above works.