I use Python and 'dateutil' package. I have two dates 'date1' and 'date2' that are parsed from some strings:
import dateutil.parser
date1 = dateutil.parser.parse(string1,fuzzy=True)
date2 = dateutil.parser.parse(string2,fuzzy=True)
How is it possible to get absolute (non-negative) time difference between 'date1' and 'date2' in seconds? Just one number.
dateutil.parser.parse
returns datetime.datetime
objects which you can subtract from each other to get a datetime.timedelta
object, the difference between two times.
You can then use the total_seconds
method to get the number of seconds.
diff = date2 - date1
print(diff.total_seconds())
Note that if date1
is further in the future than date2
then the total_seconds
method will return a negative number.