Comparing dates problem

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On May 10, 2:37 am, Tim Golden <m... at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> kyoso... at gmail.com wrote:
> > I am writing a reminder program for our Zimbra email client. One of
> > the requirements I was given was to automatically increment or
> > decrement the display to show something like the following:
>
> > 5 minutes until appointment
>
> > or
>
> > 10 minutes past your appointment
>
> > Either way, as each minute goes by, I need to increment it or
> > decrement it. I am having trouble finding a coherent way to take the
> > same date and compare just the number of minutes between them to find
> > the difference. Like if I have an appointment at 9:30 a.m. and the app
> > is loaded at 8 a.m., I need to know the number of minutes or hours and
> > minutes until the appointment.
>
> Not the most elegant piece of code on earth,
> but this piece of code works for me (cut-and-pasted
> directly from a working project, so doesn't
> *exactly* match your requirement).
>
> <code>
> def deltastamp (now, then):
>
>    def pluralise (base, n):
>      if n > 1:
>        return "%d %ss" % (n, base)
>      else:
>        return "%d %s" % (n, base)
>
>    if now > then:
>      output_format = "%s ago"
>      delta = now - then
>    else:
>      output_format = "in %s"
>      delta = then - now
>
>    days = delta.days
>    if days <> 0:
>      wks, days = divmod (days, 7)
>      if wks > 0:
>        output = pluralise ("wk", wks)
>      else:
>        output = pluralise ("day", days)
>    else:
>      mins, secs = divmod (delta.seconds, 60)
>      hrs, mins = divmod (mins, 60)
>      if hrs > 0:
>        output = pluralise ("hr", hrs)
>      elif mins > 0:
>        output = pluralise ("min", mins)
>      else:
>        output = pluralise ("sec", secs)
>
>    return output_format % output
>
> </code>
>
> TJG

Thanks for the advice. I think this will work for me with some minor
tweaking. If not, I will post again.

Mike