Python check if date is within 24 hours

Question

I have been trying some code for this, but I can't seem to completely wrap my head around it.

I have a set date, set_date which is just some random date as you'd expect and that one is just data I get. Now I would like some error function that raises an error if datetime.now() is within 24 hours of the set_date.

I have been trying code with the timedelta(hours=24)

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

now = datetime.now()
if now < (set_date - timedelta(hours=24)):
    raise ValidationError('')

I'm not sure whats right to do with this, what the good way to do is. How exactly do I check if the current time is 24 hours before the set date?

Answer 1

Like that?

if now-timedelta(hours=24) <= set_date <= now:
    ... #date less than 24 hours in the past

If you want to check for the date to be within 24 hours on either side:

if now-timedelta(hours=24) <= set_date <= now+timedelta(hours=24):
    ... #date within 24 hours

Answer 2

To check if the date is within 24 hours.

Take a difference between the current time and the past time and check if the no. of days is zero.

past_date = datetime(2018, 6, 6, 5, 27, 28, 369051)

difference = datetime.utcnow() - past_date

if difference.days == 0:
    print "date is within 24 hours"

## Also you can check the difference between two dates in seconds
total_seconds = (difference.days * 24 * 60 * 60) + difference.seconds
# Edited. Also difference have in-built method which will return the elapsed seconds.
total_seconds = difference.total_seconds()

You can check if total_seconds is less than the desired time