Lets explore How to Find Difference Between Two Dates (In Minutes) Using Python’s datetime.timedelta(), timedelta is a class that is present in the datetime library. The timedelta class stores the difference between two datetime objects.
To find the difference between two dates in form of minutes, the attribute seconds of timedelta object can be used which can be further divided by 60 to convert to minutes.
Example 1:
The following program takes two datetime objects and finds the difference between them in minutes.
import datetime
# datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute, second)
a = datetime.datetime(2017, 6, 21, 18, 25, 30)
b = datetime.datetime(2017, 5, 16, 8, 21, 10)
# returns a timedelta object
c = a-b
print('Difference: ', c)
minutes = c.total_seconds() / 60
print('Total difference in minutes: ', minutes)
# returns the difference of the time of the day
minutes = c.seconds / 60
print('Difference in minutes: ', minutes)
Output:
Difference: 36 days, 10:04:20 Difference in minutes: 604.3333333333334
Example 2:
To get a more appropriate answer divmod() can be used which will return the fractional part of the minutes in terms of seconds:
import datetime
# datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute, second)
a = datetime.datetime(2017, 6, 21, 18, 25, 30)
b = datetime.datetime(2017, 5, 16, 8, 21, 10)
# returns a timedelta object
c = a-b
print('Difference: ', c)
# returns (minutes, seconds)
minutes = divmod(c.total_seconds(), 60)
print('Total difference in minutes: ', minutes[0], 'minutes',
minutes[1], 'seconds')
# returns the difference of the time of the day (minutes, seconds)
minutes = divmod(c.seconds, 60)
print('Total difference in minutes: ', minutes[0], 'minutes',
minutes[1], 'seconds')
Output:
Difference: 36 days, 10:04:20 Difference in minutes: 604 minutes 20 seconds
