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Stéphane Diez
19,350 Pointshow to convert datetime in python
In my python script I want to save the time like this:
start_time = datetime.now()
How can I make this start_time that it shows me how much seconds , minutes I have , I mean it's possible to do a total_seconds() or something?=
I want to convert this : datetime.now() in seconds only.
1 Answer

Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,390 PointsA datetime
is a time object. The "number of seconds" needs to be relative to some other time. if using datetime.second
you'll get the number of seconds into this datetime
's minute.
If you want the difference between two datetime
objects, you can subtract them to get a timedelta
object that has a total_seconds()
method:
$ python
Python 3.4.3 (default, Oct 14 2015, 20:28:29)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import datetime
>>> import time
>>> now1 = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> time.sleep(10)
>>> now2 = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> (now2 - now1).total_seconds()
16.014057
>>>
Using this answer from StackOverflow, you can get the seconds since the epoch (1 Jan 1970):
>>> epoch = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(0)
>>> seconds_since_epoch = (datetime.datetime.now() - epoch).total_seconds()
>>> seconds_since_epoch
1467410206.475112
Mike Wagner
23,559 PointsMike Wagner
23,559 PointsIt's not entirely clear in your question what you're trying to do. Could you possibly rephrase or elaborate a bit?