CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7datetimetimestrftime
Ryflex
Ryflex

Reputation: 5769

Add 30 minutes to a time read from a text file and compare against current time

I'm trying to make a little script to use the time from a text file and then add 30 minutes to that number, then compare against "currenttime" to see if 30+ minutes have passed...

import os
from time import time, sleep, strftime

with open('timecheck.txt') as timecheck:
    last_timecheck = timecheck.read().strip()
    print last_timecheck 

currenttime = strftime('%H:%M:%S')
if last_timecheck + 30 >= currenttime:
    if os.path.exists("../test.csv"):
        with open("timecheck.txt", 'wb') as timecheck:
            timecheck.write("1")
    else:
        currenttime = strftime('%H:%M:%S')
        with open("timecheck.txt", 'wb') as timecheck:
            timecheck.write(currenttime)

Any help would be appreciated, I can't figure out how to do it correctly.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 338

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1121256

Instead of creating a string for the current time, parse the string read from the file, using datetime.datetime.strftime() for example:

import datetime

last_timecheck = datetime.datetime.strptime(last_timecheck, '%H:%M:%S')
last_timecheck = datetime.datetime.combine(datetime.date.today(), last_timecheck.time())

if last_timecheck + datetime.timedelta(minutes=30) <= datetime.datetime.now():

This checks if more than 30 minutes have passed.

You probably should include the date in the information you write to the file. If you don't, then 23:30:45 will never be '30 minutes ago' on the current day.

If you don't need the timestamp to be human-readable, just write seconds since the UNIX epoch:

timecheck.write(str(time.time()))

That's a floating point value, and you can read it again with:

last_timecheck = float(timecheck.read())

Since it is a numeric representation, you can then test if 30 minutes have passed with:

if last_timecheck + 30 <= time.time():

Upvotes: 5

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