Comparing dates problem

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On May 9, 5:12 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On May 10, 7:34 am, kyoso... at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi,
>
> > I am writing a reminder program for our Zimbra email client. One of
> > the requirements I was given was to automatically increment or
> > decrement the display to show something like the following:
>
> > 5 minutes until appointment
>
> > or
>
> > 10 minutes past your appointment
>
> > Either way, as each minute goes by, I need to increment it or
> > decrement it. I am having trouble finding a coherent way to take the
> > same date and compare just the number of minutes between them to find
> > the difference. Like if I have an appointment at 9:30 a.m. and the app
> > is loaded at 8 a.m., I need to know the number of minutes or hours and
> > minutes until the appointment.
>
> > I have looked at the dateutils module and it has many comparison
> > methods, but they seem to only return the number of days or seconds.
>
> Ermmm ... what's wrong with
>
> minutes = seconds / 60.0
> hours = minutes / 60.0
>
> ?

I'm sure there is a hack for doing something like what you suggest,
but it would be messy. The problem is that I get a datetime object
returned and division really isn't something you can do to one of
those objects. Besides, if I had seconds returned, I would want to
multiply by 60, not divide.

Maybe I misunderstand you.

Mike