timespan

Utilities for working with popular timespan formats.

.Net Timespans

Functions are provided for converting between .NET 7.0 TimeSpan objects (with format specifiers) and Python's datetime.timedelta objects.

timespan.from_string(str) -> timedelta

Converts a TimeSpan string in the current locale to a datetime.timedelta object, e.g.

>>> import timespan
>>> timespan.c(3, 17, 25, 30, 500)
'3.17:25:30.5000000'
>>> timespan.from_string('3.17:25:30.5000000')
datetime.timedelta(days=3, seconds=62730, microseconds=500000)

Parameters

• timespan_string: TimeSpan string of any format and locale.

Return Value

A timedelta object.

timespan.to_string(specifier: str, *args: tuple) -> str

Converts date\time information (variable-length tuple) to a TimeSpan string in the current locale.

Parameters

• specifier: format specifier. Options are 'c', 'g' and 'G'.
• args: variable-length tuple (size 1, 3, 4 or 5) specifying components of date and time.

Return Value

A TimeSpan string

Notes

See the switch case of _args_to_seconds() in src/timespan/dotnet.py for full coverage of all input types.

Asterisk Timespans

Asterisk style timespans allow you to check if a timestamp falls within a specified list of boundaries. For example, you might want to program your phone system to only accept calls Mon-Fri from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on holidays like Christmas.

Timespans are specified in the form of times|daysofweek|days|months. If your timespan starts with !, it'll only match if the timestamps falls outside the given range.

Basic example:

import timespan
from datetime import datetime

business_hours = [
    '9:00-17:00|mon-fri|*|*',  # is between 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mon to Fri
    '!*|*|1|jan',              # not new years
    '!*|*|25|dec',             # not christmas
    '!*|thu|22-28|nov',        # not thanksgiving
]

if timespan.match(business_hours, datetime.now()):
    print "we're open for business!"
else:
    print "sorry, we're closed :("

For more examples, see the documentation or source code.