Now & Today

As you can see, the methods now() and today() will give the same results.
The difference is that now() can take a timezone as an argument, and today doesn’t.

>>> import datetime
>>> now = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> today = datetime.datetime.today()
>>> now
datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 17, 17, 14, 10, 481635)
>>> today
datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 17, 17, 14, 18, 970121)

Combine Date &Time

Combine lets us combine a date and a time.
Let’s consider that Today should represent a date at midnight

import datetime

now = datetime.datetime.now()
today = datetime.datetime.today()
realistic_today = datetime.datetime.combine(datetime.date.today(), datetime.time())

print("Now: {}".format(now))
print("Today: {}".format(today))
print("A Realistic Today: {}".format(realistic_today))

OUTPUT:
Now: 2017-04-17 14:33:09.245782
Today: 2017-04-17 14:33:09.245799
A Realistic Today: 2017-04-17 00:00:00

If no values were given as arguments to datetime.time(),
it will return the default values set for hour, minute and second which is 0 for each (i.e. datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 17, 0, 0) )

Testing the Realistic Today

>>> realistic.year
2017
>>> realistic.month
4
>>> realistic.hour
0
>>> realistic.weekday()
0
>>> now.timestamp()
1492438450.481635

Monday is 0.

1492438450.481635 is your local system time.

Exercise

Write a function named minutes that takes two datetimes and, using timedelta.total_seconds() to get the number of seconds, returns the number of minutes, rounded, between them. The first will always be older and the second newer. You’ll need to subtract the first from the second.

import datetime 

def minutes(before, after):
    interval = after - before
    intv_minutes = round(interval.total_seconds()/60)
    return intv_minutes