Comparing dates problem

[John Machin]

On May 11, 4:52 am, kyoso... at gmail.com wrote:
> On May 9, 5:12 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
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> > On May 10, 7:34 am, kyoso... at gmail.com wrote:
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> > > Hi,
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> > > 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:
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> > > 5 minutes until appointment
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> > > or
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> > > 10 minutes past your appointment
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> > > 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.
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> > > 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.
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> > Ermmm ... what's wrong with
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> > 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.
>

Maybe it's mutual -- hack? messy? multiply? Where I come from, 180
seconds is (180 / 60 = 3) minutes. 180 seconds * 60 is 10800 sixtieths-
of-a-second, which appears to be travelling away from a solution to
your problem.

You have *TWO* datetime objects, (say) appt_dt and now_dt.

delta =appt_dt - now_dt # delta is a timedelta object.
# calculate difference in minutes
mins = delta.days * 24 * 60  + delta.seconds // 60

Have you not read Tim Golden's response?