How to compare hours and minutes?

Question

I have four variables:

start_hour = '12'
start_minute = '00'
end_hour = '22'
end_minute = '30'

and from datetime:

current_hour = datetime.now().hour
curren_minute = datetime.now().minute

And I want to compare if the current time is within the range:

if int(start_hour) <= current_hour and int(end_hour) >= current_hour:
    something

But how to implement this with minutes?

Answer 1

You can use datetime.timedelta to do the comparisons reliably. You can specify a delta in different units of time (hours, minutes, seconds, etc.) Then you don't have to worry about converting to hours, minutes, etc. explicitly.

For example, to check if the current time is more than an hour from the start_time:

if abs(datetime.now() - start_time) > datetime.timedelta(hours=1):
    # Do thing 

You can also use timedelta to shift a time by a given amount:

six_point_five_hours_from_now = datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(hours=6, minutes=30)

The nice thing about timedelta apart from easy conversions between units is it will automatically handle time differences that span multiple days, etc.

Answer 2

A much better way to go about this would beto convert both times to minutes:

start_time = int(start_hour)*60 + int(start_minute)
end_time = int(end_hour)*60 + int(end_minute)
current_time =  datetime.now().hour*60 +datetime.now().minute
if start_time <= current_time and end_time >= current_time:
    #doSomething

If you need to include seconds, convert everything to seconds.