Generating 15 minute time interval array in python

Question

I am trying to generate time interval array. for example:

time_array = [\"2016-09-02T17:30:00Z\", \"2016-09-02T17:45:00Z\", 
              \"2016-09-02T18:00         


        

Answer 1

Here is an example using an arbitrary date time

from datetime import datetime

start = datetime(1900,1,1,0,0,0)
end = datetime(1900,1,2,0,0,0)

Now you need to get the timedelta (the difference between two dates or times.) between the start and end

seconds = (end - start).total_seconds()

Define the 15 minutes interval

from datetime import timedelta

step = timedelta(minutes=15)

Iterate over the range of seconds, with step of time delta of 15 minutes (900 seconds) and sum it to start.

array = []
for i in range(0, int(seconds), int(step.total_seconds())):
    array.append(start + timedelta(seconds=i))

print array
[datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 0),
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 15),
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 30),
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 45),
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 1, 0),
...

At the end you can format the datetime objects to str representation.

array = [i.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M%:%S') for i in array]

print array
['1900-01-01 00:00:00',
 '1900-01-01 00:15:00',
 '1900-01-01 00:30:00',
 '1900-01-01 00:45:00',
 '1900-01-01 01:00:00',
...

You can format datetime object at first iteration. But it may hurt your eyes

array.append((start + timedelta(seconds=i)).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M%:%S'))