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pythontime
Steve Jay
Steve Jay

Reputation: 1473

How to compare times of the day?

I see that date comparisons can be done and there's also datetime.timedelta(), but I'm struggling to find out how to check if the current time (datetime.datetime.now()) is earlier, later or the same than a specified time (e.g. 8am) regardless of the date.

Upvotes: 144

Views: 360557

Answers (8)

Aryan Vikash
Aryan Vikash

Reputation: 101

You Can Use Timedelta fuction for x time increase comparision.

>>> import datetime 

>>> now = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> after_10_min = now + datetime.timedelta(minutes = 10)
>>> now > after_10_min 

False

Just A combination of these answers this And Roger

Upvotes: 8

Jesse Reza Khorasanee
Jesse Reza Khorasanee

Reputation: 3471

Surprised I haven't seen this one liner here:

datetime.datetime.now().hour == 8

Upvotes: 11

Thomas Dignan
Thomas Dignan

Reputation: 7102

Another way to do this without adding dependencies or using datetime is to simply do some math on the attributes of the time object. It has hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, and a timezone. For very simple comparisons, hours and minutes should be sufficient.

d = datetime.utcnow()
t = d.time()
print t.hour,t.minute,t.second

I don't recommend doing this unless you have an incredibly simple use-case. For anything requiring timezone awareness or awareness of dates, you should be using datetime.

Upvotes: 3

AndrewR
AndrewR

Reputation: 166

Inspired by Roger Pate:

import datetime
def todayAt (hr, min=0, sec=0, micros=0):
   now = datetime.datetime.now()
   return now.replace(hour=hr, minute=min, second=sec, microsecond=micros)    

# Usage demo1:
print todayAt (17), todayAt (17, 15)

# Usage demo2:    
timeNow = datetime.datetime.now()
if timeNow < todayAt (13):
   print "Too Early"

Upvotes: 7

P&#228;r Wieslander
P&#228;r Wieslander

Reputation: 28934

You can use the time() method of datetime objects to get the time of day, which you can use for comparison without taking the date into account:

>>> this_morning = datetime.datetime(2009, 12, 2, 9, 30)
>>> last_night = datetime.datetime(2009, 12, 1, 20, 0)
>>> this_morning.time() < last_night.time()
True

Upvotes: 85

Roger Pate
Roger Pate

Reputation:

You can't compare a specific point in time (such as "right now") against an unfixed, recurring event (8am happens every day).

You can check if now is before or after today's 8am:

>>> import datetime
>>> now = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> today8am = now.replace(hour=8, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)
>>> now < today8am
True
>>> now == today8am
False
>>> now > today8am
False

Upvotes: 194

Kimvais
Kimvais

Reputation: 39548

You can compare datetime.datetime objects directly

E.g:

>>> a
datetime.datetime(2009, 12, 2, 10, 24, 34, 198130)
>>> b
datetime.datetime(2009, 12, 2, 10, 24, 36, 910128)
>>> a < b
True
>>> a > b
False
>>> a == a
True
>>> b == b
True
>>>

Upvotes: 13

luc
luc

Reputation: 43096

datetime have comparison capability

>>> import datetime
>>> import time
>>> a =  datetime.datetime.now()
>>> time.sleep(2.0)
>>> b =  datetime.datetime.now()
>>> print a < b
True
>>> print a == b
False

Upvotes: 1

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