Convert datetime since a given date to minutes

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Python datetime to Unix timestamp

Is there a way to convert a datetime to int, representing the minutes since, for example, January 2012, so that this int can be modified, written to a database, compared and so on? EDIT: The server I am running this on uses Python 2.6.6

Answer 1

Subtracting two datetime.datetime objects gives you a timedelta object, which has a .total_seconds() method (added in Python 2.7). Divide this by 60 and cast to int() to get minutes since your reference date:

import datetime

january1st = datetime.datetime(2012, 01, 01)
timesince = datetime.datetime.now() - january1st
minutessince = int(timesince.total_seconds() / 60)

or in a python shell:

>>> import datetime
>>> january1st = datetime.datetime(2012, 01, 01)
>>> timesince = datetime.datetime.now() - january1st
>>> minutessince = int(timesince.total_seconds() / 60)
>>> minutessince
346208

For python 2.6 and earlier, you'll have to use the .days and .seconds attributes to calculate the minutes:

minutessince = timesince.days * 1440 + timesince.seconds // 60

which gives you an integer as well.