Python - How to calculate the elapsed time since X date?

python elapsedtime
André picture André · Nov 22, 2011 · Viewed 11.8k times · Source

I have a database table with articles and each one of this articles have a submitted date. I need to calculate the days and hours since the article have been published in the database, like:

This article has been published 4 hours ago.
This article has been published 3 days and 4 hours ago.

There are already some code that I can reuse to do this? I've searched on google, but maybe I'm not using the correct words.

Any clue that could help me?

Best Regards,

Answer

Mark Ransom picture Mark Ransom · Nov 22, 2011

Have a look at the datetime package, it has everything you need.

when you subtract one datetime from another, you get a timedelta object. You can use total_seconds() to get the duration in seconds and use division to convert it to hours and days. Then your only job then is to format it into a readable string.

Related questions

tkinter and time.sleep

I am trying to delete text inside a text box after waiting 5 seconds, but instead the program wont run and does sleep over everything else. Also is there a way for me to just make my textbox sleep so i …

Read More
How do I list all files of a directory?

How can I list all files of a directory in Python and add them to a list?

Read More
Iterating over dictionaries using 'for' loops

I am a bit puzzled by the following code: d = {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3} for key in d: print key, 'corresponds to', d[key] What I don't understand is the key portion. How does Python recognize that it needs only to …

Read More