Turning pairs of datetimes into durations
When working with timestamps, we often want to know how much time has elapsed between events. Thankfully, we can use datetime arithmetic to ask Python to do the heavy lifting for us so we don't need to worry about day, month, or year boundaries. Let's calculate the number of seconds that the bike was out of the dock for each trip.
Continuing our work from a previous coding exercise, the bike trip data has been loaded as the list onebike_datetimes. Each element of the list consists of two datetime objects, corresponding to the start and end of a trip, respectively.
This exercise is part of the course
Working with Dates and Times in Python
Exercise instructions
- Within the loop:
- Use arithmetic on the
startandendelements to find the length of the trip - Save the results to
trip_duration. - Calculate
trip_length_secondsfromtrip_duration.
- Use arithmetic on the
Hands-on interactive exercise
Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.
# Initialize a list for all the trip durations
onebike_durations = []
for trip in onebike_datetimes:
# Create a timedelta object corresponding to the length of the trip
trip_duration = ____[____] - ____[____]
# Get the total elapsed seconds in trip_duration
trip_length_seconds = trip_duration.____()
# Append the results to our list
onebike_durations.append(trip_length_seconds)