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Gustavo Guzmán
4,213 PointsHow to create a function with arguments that work on the timedelta function???
I really tried, but can't find a solution that works: the aim is to create a function that takes 'minutes', 'seconds', 'days', 'years', along with an interger as arguments, and so these can be passed on to a datetime.timedelta function/method. However, timedelta is very specific about how to pass the arguments to it, e.g. 'days=4', so other arg names dont work.
I found on the internet an alternative, which would be creating a dict with the keys and values, and passing that on to the timedelta, but that still wouldn't work for this challenge!
How do you solve it?
import datetime
starter = datetime.datetime(2015, 10, 21, 16, 29)
# Remember, you can't set "years" on a timedelta!
# Consider a year to be 365 days.
## Example
# time_machine(5, "minutes") => datetime(2015, 10, 21, 16, 34)
def time_machine(num, duration):
if duration == 'years':
travel = (datetime.timedelta(days = 365)) * num
travel = datetime.timedelta(duration = num)
return starter + travel
2 Answers
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 PointsHey Gustavo Guzmán, you’re on the right track.
Two errors to fix:
- the second assignment to
travelshould be in anelse:block - the value of
durationneeds to be used as the keyword argument. As it is, the string “duration” is being used as the keyword.
One method to resolve this would be to use many if/elif statements to determine the value of duration and set travel accordingly.
A trick to accomplish this in one statement is to creat a dict the unpack it as a key/value pair:
datetime.timedelta(**{duration: num})
will create a dict of {“value_of_duration”: num}, then by using **{} this key/value pair will be unrolled just like **kwargs
Edit: adding another variable to dict option:
>>> dur = "days"
>>> value = 4
>>> dict([(dur, value)])
{‘month’: 4}
>>> datetime.timedelta(**dict([(dur, value)]))
datetime.timedelta(4)
Post back if you need more help. Good luck!!!
Gustavo Guzmán
4,213 PointsThank you very much! I've managed to get it using the many if/elifs. I didn't think it was very Pythonic, but it worked. I will definitely try the dictionary option, though, because I need to practice that.