Date difference in minutes in Python

Question

How do I calculate the difference in time in minutes for the following timestamp in Python?

2010-01-01 17:31:22
2010-01-03 17:31:22

Answer 1

If you are trying to find the difference between timestamps that are in pandas columns, the the answer is fairly simple. If you need it in days or seconds then

# For difference in days:
df['diff_in_days']=(df['timestamp2'] - df['timestamp1']).dt.days
# For difference in seconds
df['diff_in_seconds']=(df['timestamp2'] - df['timestamp1']).dt.seconds

Now minute is tricky as dt.minute works only on datetime64[ns] dtype. whereas the column generated from subtracting two datetimes has format

AttributeError: 'TimedeltaProperties' object has no attribute 'm8'

So like mentioned by many above to get the actual value of the difference in minute you have to do:

df['diff_in_min']=df['diff_in_seconds']/60

But if just want the difference between the minute parts of the two timestamps then do the following

#convert the timedelta to datetime and then extract minute
df['diff_in_min']=(pd.to_datetime(df['timestamp2']-df['timestamp1'])).dt.minute

You can also read the article https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/datetime.html and see section 8.1.2 you'll see the read only attributes are only seconds,days and milliseconds. And this settles why the minute function doesn't work directly.