How do I convert datetime.timedelta to minutes, hours in Python?

Question

I get a start_date like this:

from django.utils.timezone import utc import datetime  start_date = datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc) end_date = datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc) duration = end_date - start_date 

I get output like this:

datetime.timedelta(0, 5, 41038) 

How do I convert this into normal time like the following?

10 minutes, 1 hour like this

Answer 1

There's no built-in formatter for timedelta objects, but it's pretty easy to do it yourself:

days, seconds = duration.days, duration.seconds hours = days * 24 + seconds // 3600 minutes = (seconds % 3600) // 60 seconds = seconds % 60 

Or, equivalently, if you're in Python 2.7+ or 3.2+:

seconds = duration.total_seconds() hours = seconds // 3600 minutes = (seconds % 3600) // 60 seconds = seconds % 60 

Now you can print it however you want:

'{} minutes, {} hours'.format(minutes, hours) 

For example:

def convert_timedelta(duration):     days, seconds = duration.days, duration.seconds     hours = days * 24 + seconds // 3600     minutes = (seconds % 3600) // 60     seconds = (seconds % 60)     return hours, minutes, seconds td = datetime.timedelta(2, 7743, 12345) hours, minutes, seconds = convert_timedelta(td) print '{} minutes, {} hours'.format(minutes, hours) 

This will print:

9 minutes, 50 hours 

If you want to get "10 minutes, 1 hour" instead of "10 minutes, 1 hours", you need to do that manually too:

print '{} minute{}, {} hour{}'.format(minutes, 's' if minutes != 1 else '',                                       hours, 's' if minutes != 1 else '') 

Or you may want to write an english_plural function to do the 's' bits for you, instead of repeating yourself.

From your comments, it sounds like you actually want to keep the days separate. That's even easier:

def convert_timedelta(duration):     days, seconds = duration.days, duration.seconds     hours = seconds // 3600     minutes = (seconds % 3600) // 60     seconds = (seconds % 60)     return days, hours, minutes, seconds 

If you want to convert this to a single value to store in a database, then convert that single value back to format it, do this:

def dhms_to_seconds(days, hours, minutes, seconds):     return (((days * 24) + hours) * 60 + minutes) * 60 + seconds  def seconds_to_dhms(seconds):     days = seconds // (3600 * 24)     hours = (seconds // 3600) % 24     minutes = (seconds // 60) % 60     seconds = seconds % 60     return days, hours, minutes, seconds 

So, putting it together:

def store_timedelta_in_database(thingy, duration):     seconds = dhms_to_seconds(*convert_timedelta(duration))     db.execute('INSERT INTO foo (thingy, duration) VALUES (?, ?)',                thingy, seconds)     db.commit()  def print_timedelta_from_database(thingy):     cur = db.execute('SELECT duration FROM foo WHERE thingy = ?', thingy)     seconds = int(cur.fetchone()[0])     days, hours, minutes, seconds = seconds_to_dhms(seconds)     print '{} took {} minutes, {} hours, {} days'.format(thingy, minutes, hours, days)