Difference between two times (working ugly code, needs polish)

[Shawn Milochik]

I have done what I wanted, but I think there must be a much better way.

Given two timestamps in the following format, I just want to figure
out how far apart they are (in days, seconds, whatever).

Format:

YYYY-MM-DD_MM:SS

Example:
2007-09-11_16:41


It seems to me that to do what I want, I need to convert a string into
a number (time.mktime()), such as this: 1189543487.0

Once I have that, I can just subtract one from the other and do
whatever I want. The ugly part is converting something like
2007-09-11_16:41 to the numeric equivalent.

Below is my code. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.


Here is what I have (works):

#runTimeStamp is the current time, set when the script begins execution
def recAge(lastUpdate, runTimeStamp):

    import re

    oneDay = 60 * 60 * 24

    lastUpdate = re.sub(r'\D+', ',', lastUpdate)
    lastUpdate = lastUpdate + ",0,0,0,0"
    lastUpdate = [int(x) for x in lastUpdate.split(',')]
    lastUpdate = time.mktime(tuple(lastUpdate))

    runTimeStamp = re.sub(r'\D+', ',', runTimeStamp)
    runTimeStamp = runTimeStamp + ",0,0,0,0"
    runTimeStamp = [int(x) for x in runTimeStamp.split(',')]
    runTimeStamp = time.mktime(tuple(runTimeStamp))

    return (runTimeStamp - lastUpdate) / oneDay