Random Time Generation

Question

I am Newbie to Python I am trying a little Random Time Generator which generates random time from the given initialize variable and ending at the given end variable for the 1000 records and have to save those 1000 records into database.

So Far i have reached is this code.

SQL.py

from sqlalchemy import create_engine, Column, Integer
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

engine = create_engine('sqlite:///sql.sqlite')
Base = declarative_base()
Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)

session = Session()

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'users'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    time = Column(Integer, default=None, index=True)

Base.metadata.create_all(engine)

Random.py

import datetime
import time
import random


MINTIME = datetime.datetime(2010,8,6,8,14,59)
MAXTIME = datetime.datetime(2013,8,6,8,14,59)
RECORDS = 1000

for RECORD in range(RECORDS):
    RANDOMTIME = random.randint(MINTIME, MAXTIME)
    print RANDOMTIME

It produces the traceback as this

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'datetime.datetime' and 'int'

What i am doing wrong and if possible suggest some refactored method.

Answer 1

Basically, the issue is: random.randint expects integers. So you should give it integers, and convert it back to datetime as you require

There could be a more efficient way, but here is one approach:

import datetime
import time

MINTIME = datetime.datetime(2010,8,6,8,14,59)
MAXTIME = datetime.datetime(2013,8,6,8,14,59)

mintime_ts = int(time.mktime(MINTIME.timetuple()))
maxtime_ts = int(time.mktime(MAXTIME.timetuple()))

for RECORD in range(RECORDS):
    random_ts = random.randint(mintime_ts, maxtime_ts)
    RANDOMTIME = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(random_ts)
    print RANDOMTIME

Answer 2

The problem is:

RANDOMTIME = random.randint(MINTIME, MAXTIME)

randint expects two integers, you are providing two dates.

you can do the following, considering the time is the same for MINTIME and MAXTIME:

for RECORD in range(RECORDS):
    n = random.randint(0,(MAXTIME-MINTIME).days)
    RANDOMTIME = MINTIME + datetime.deltatime(n)