Question

I’m trying to convert a date string into an age.

The string is like: ‘Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:45:32 +0200’ and I need to work out how many days old it is.

I have sucessfully converted the date using:

>>> time.strptime('Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:45:32 +0200','%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0200') (2008, 11, 17, 1, 45, 32, 0, 322, -1) 

For some reason %z gives me an error for the +0200 but it doesn’t matter that much.

I can get the current time using:

>>> time.localtime() (2009, 2, 3, 19, 55, 32, 1, 34, 0) 

but how can I subtract one from the other without going though each item in the list and doing it manually?

Answer 1

You need to use the module datetime and the object datetime.timedelta

from datetime import datetime  t1 = datetime.strptime('Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:45:32 +0200','%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0200') t2 = datetime.now()  tdelta = t2 - t1 # actually a datetime.timedelta object print tdelta.days