How can I produce a human readable difference when subtracting two UNIX timestamps using Python?

tinkertim_50049 0
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This question is similar to this question about subtracting dates with Python, but not identical. I'm not dealing with strings, I have to figure out the difference between two epoch time stamps and produce the difference in a human readable format.

For instance:

32 Seconds
17 Minutes
22.3 Hours
1.25 Days
3.5 Weeks
2 Months
4.25 Years

Alternately, I'd like to express the difference like this:

4 years, 6 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 6 hours 21 minutes and 15 seconds

I don't think I can use strptime, since I'm working with the difference of two epoch dates. I could write something to do this, but I'm quite sure that there's something already written that I could use.

What module would be appropriate? Am I just missing something in time? My journey into Python is just really beginning, if this is indeed a duplicate it's because I failed to figure out what to search for.

Addendum

For accuracy, I really care most about the current year's calendar.

formatting time python
8 Answers

Check out the humanize package

https://github.com/jmoiron/humanize

import datetime

humanize.naturaltime(datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(seconds=1))

'a second ago'

humanize.naturaltime(datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600))

'an hour ago'
user_4288030

Here's a shorter one for interval in seconds and within a day (t<86400). Useful if you work with unix timestamps (seconds since epoch, UTC).

t = 45678
print('%d hours, %d minutes, %d seconds' % (t//3600, t%3600//60, t%60))

May be extended further (t//86400, ...).

user_7733060

A very old question but I found this solution which seems to be very simple in Python3:

print(datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600))
# output: 1:00:00
print(datetime.timedelta(hours=360.1245))
# output: 15 days, 0:07:28.200000
user_23519660
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