Determining "days" in python when the timedelta.days is less than one

Question

sorry in advance if this is dense. I am trying to find the days since I last posted a tweet. The problem I am running into is when the dates are different, e.g., today and yesterday, but not enough hours have passed to be a full "day."

# "created_at" is part of the Twitter API, returned as UTC time. The 
# timedelta here is to account for the fact I am on the west coast, USA 
lastTweetAt =  result.created_at + timedelta(hours=-8)

# get local time
rightNow = datetime.now()

# subtract the two datetimes (which gives me a timedelta)
dt = rightNow - lastTweetAt

# print the number of days difference
print dt.days

The problem is that if I posted a tweet at say 5 PM yesterday and am running the script at 8 AM today, only 15 hours have passed, which is 0 days. But obviously I want to say it's been 1 day since my last tweet if it was yesterday. And a kludge of adding "+1" isn't going to help because if I have tweeted today, I want the result to be 0.

Is there a better approach than using timedelta to get the difference?

---

Solution provided by Matti Lyra

The answer is to call .date() on the datetimes so they are converted to coarser date objects (without timestamps). The correct code looks like:

# "created_at" is part of the Twitter API, returned as UTC time.
# the -8 timedelta is to account for me being on the west coast, USA
lastTweetAt =  result.created_at + timedelta(hours=-8)

# get UTC time for right now
rightNow = datetime.now()

# truncate the datetimes to date objects (which have dates, but no timestamp)
# and subtract them (which gives me a timedelta)
dt = rightNow.date() - lastTweetAt.date()

# print the number of days difference
print dt.days

Answer 1

How about dealing just with the "date" part of your datetimes?

The part after outputing "0" in the following code:

>>> a = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> b = datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(hours=20)
>>> (a-b).days
0
>>> b.date() - a.date()
datetime.timedelta(-1)
>>> (b.date() - a.date()).days
-1

Answer 2

You can use datetime.date() to compare the two dates (note: NOT dates with times), this truncates the datetime to have an resolution of days not hours.

...
# subtract the two datetimes (which gives me a timedelta)
dt = rightNow.date() - lastTweetAt.date()
...

The docs are always your friend

http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime#datetime.datetime.date