How can I produce a human readable difference when subtracting two UNIX timestamps using Python?

Question

This question is similar to this question about subtracting dates with Python, but not identical. I\'m not dealing with strings, I have to figure out the difference between

Answer 1

You can use the wonderful dateutil module and its relativedelta class:

import datetime
import dateutil.relativedelta

dt1 = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(123456789) # 1973-11-29 22:33:09
dt2 = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(234567890) # 1977-06-07 23:44:50
rd = dateutil.relativedelta.relativedelta (dt2, dt1)

print "%d years, %d months, %d days, %d hours, %d minutes and %d seconds" % (rd.years, rd.months, rd.days, rd.hours, rd.minutes, rd.seconds)
# 3 years, 6 months, 9 days, 1 hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds

It doesn't count weeks, but that shouldn't be too hard to add.