How can I compare two dates of different types in Python?

Question

I get a date from a file in the following format:

2018-07-20 05:16:12

I need to compare this date with a file's last modified date. I can get the last modified date in the following format:

datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.path.getmtime('test-reboot-3.txt'))
datetime.datetime(2018, 7, 27, 7, 58, 15, 541916)

How can I compare the latter date with the above mentioned date from my file?

Answer 1

You need to convert your string to datetime object and then compare.

Ex:

import datetime
d1 = "2018-07-20 05:16:12"
d1 = datetime.datetime.strptime(d1, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

d2 = datetime.datetime(2018, 7, 27, 7, 58, 15, 541916) 

print(d2 - d1)

Output:

7 days, 2:42:03.541916