How to calculate the difference between dates in python

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How can I subtract a day from a python date?
subtract two times in python

I had generated date in python as below

import time
time_stamp = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

print time_stamp

Result:

'2012-12-19'

What i am trying is, if above time_stamp is the present today's date , i want a date '2012-12-17' by performing difference(substraction of two days)

So how to perform date reduction of two days from the current date in python

Answer 1

To perform calculations between some dates in Python use the timedelta class from the datetime module.

To do what you want to achieve, the following code should suffice.

import datetime

time_stamp = datetime.datetime(day=21, month=12, year=2012)

difference = time_stamp - datetime.timedelta(day=2)

print '%s-%s-%s' % (difference.year, difference.year, difference.day)

Explanation of the above:

• The second line creates a new datetime object (from the the datetime class), with specified day, month and year
• The third line creates a timedelta object, which is used to perform calculations between datetime objects