Datetime Format and calculation

Question

I'm trying to make a simple system which would get the current time and get another time after few secs, then see the difference with both of the times, so it's 2 seconds. So what I need is the other format like this > YEAR,MONTH,DAY HOUR:MIN. This is the code which I use for this purpose, but in brackets there are just an example of the format I need.

a = datetime.datetime.now( %Y, %m %d %H:%M)
time.sleep(2)
b = datetime.datetime.now( %Y, %m %d %H:%M)
print(b-a)
print(a)
print(b)

Answer 1

I thing strftime is what you're looking for

import datetime
import time

a = datetime.datetime.now()
time.sleep(2)
b = datetime.datetime.now()
print(b-a)
print(a.strftime("%Y, %m, %d %H:%M"))
print(b.strftime("%Y, %m, %d %H:%M"))

prints

0:00:02.001719
2019, 09, 04 15:17
2019, 09, 04 15:17

For more formats, you can see strftime reference: https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/datetime/strftime.

Answer 2

You can convert a datetime.datetime instance to a string formatted to your liking using the strftime() function. For instance, to print with your preferred formatting you could do the following:

>>> import datetime
>>> a = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> print(a.strftime("%Y, %m %d %H:%M")
2019, 09 04 17:11

Subtracting two dates will yield a datetime.timedelta object, you can convert this to the number of seconds using the total_seconds() function:

>>> import datetime
>>> from time import sleep
>>> a = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> sleep(2)
>>> b = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> delta = b - a
>>> print(delta.total_seconds())
2.001301