Python - Date & Time Comparison using timestamps, timedelta

Question

I\'ve spent the past hour digging around the Python docs and many SO questions; please forgive me for being another Python newbie trapped by the mystery of time difference i

Answer 1

You should be able to use

tdelta.total_seconds()

to get the value you are looking for. This is because tdelta is a timedelta object, as is any difference between datetime objects.

A couple of notes:

1. Using strftime followed by strptime is superfluous. You should be able to get the current datetime with datetime.now.
2. Similarly, using time.ctime followed by strptime is more work than needed. You should be able to get the other datetime object with datetime.fromtimestamp.

So, your final code could be

now = datetime.now()
then = datetime.fromtimestamp(os.path.getmtime("x.cache"))
tdelta = now - then
seconds = tdelta.total_seconds()