Difference between evaluating timestamp and total_seconds

Question

When I evaluate the number of seconds between two dates using two different methods (either using timestamp() or total_seconds()) in datetime in python, I get different resu

Answer 1

The discrepancy is caused by Daylight Savings Time. If one of your dates falls in your timezone's DST range, and the other does not, you end up with an off-by-one hour error in your calculation.

From 1966 to 1973, DST in the United States ran from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, which explains @JoshuaRLi's findings.

It looks like, when subtracting two dates, it's not paying attention to DST discrepancies; t1 - t2 produces datetime.timedelta(162), a difference of 162 days, even though technically, the difference in hours would be 162 * 24 - 1 hours (the - 1 accounting for the DST skip). timestamp is handling this (both timestamps are relative to UTC, so the DST timestamp correctly shows as one hour earlier, because there was an hour skipped to produce it).