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Python Dates and Times in Python (2014) Let's Build a Timed Quiz App The Quiz Class

Ron Chan
Ron Chan
10,987 Points

timedelta input type

While attempting to solve the challenge, I passed in a string as an argument to the timedelta method and found it does not accept a string as an input. So I have 2 questions:

  1. What exactly is the 'type' being passed in to the timedelta method?

  2. Is there a way to parse the string into the type accepted by the method or is it necessary to use another method to achieve the same output required by the question?

def time_machine(time_int, int_string):
  output = starter + datetime.timedelta("{}={}".format(int_string, time_int))
  return output

1 Answer

Chris Freeman
MOD
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 Points

datetime.timedelta() takes numeric positional arguments or numerics as keyword arguments. The numerics can be integers or floats.

  • datetime.timedelta(1) is one day
  • datetime.timedelta(1, 2) is one day, and 2 seconds
  • datetime.timedelta(1, 2, 3) is one day, 2 seconds, and 3 microseconds
  • datetime.timedelta(days = 1) is one day
  • datetime.timedelta(0, 2) is two seconds
  • datetime.timedelta(seconds = 2) is two seconds
  • datetime.timedelta(0, 0, 3) is three microseconds
  • datetime.timedelta(microseconds = 3) is three microseconds

More information at help(datetime.timedelta) or at timedelta

EDIT: One way to parse strings into your time_machine() function is to define a dictionary to unpack in timedelta():

def time_machine(time_int, int_string):
    kwargs = {time_int: float(int_string)}
    output = starter + datetime.timedelta(**kwargs)
    return output

EDIT #2: After running the challenge, I see that they toss "years" at you. Here is a version of the code above plus a check for "years":

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(tint, string):
  if string == "years":
    string = "days"
    tint = tint * 365
  kwargs = {string: tint}
  return starter + datetime.timedelta(**kwargs)
Ron Chan
Ron Chan
10,987 Points

You mentioned: datetime.timedelta(seconds = 2) is two seconds

So for instance int_string is defined as a string "seconds", and time_int is 2, how should I pass them into the timedelta method as an argument or arguments? I tried to do that with the code snippet above and apparently the format method turned everything into a string which the timedelta method does not accept.

Ron Chan
Ron Chan
10,987 Points

Thanks Chris, appreciate your help! It did not occur to me that the arguments for the timedelta method would be the same format as the way dictionaries are stored.

Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 Points

More precisely, it's not that the timedelta() function, or any function, takes a dictionary as an argument, it's the way a dictionary can be "unpacked" to be used as the keyword arguments for a function. Using **kwargs works for any function that takes keyword arguments. It can also be in the function's defined argument list to accept an arbitrary number of arguments. This is covered in a one of the Treehouse Python modules, if you haven't hit it yet. **kwargs is one of my favorite python magic bits.

This StackOverflow post has more details.