How to use striptime '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' minus - 1 minute.?

Question

I am trying to basically use striptime that gives me format of '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' etc '2019-05-03 09:00:00' and what I am trying to achieve is that I want to take that time - 1 minute so the output should be - 2019-05-03 08:59:00

what I have done so far is

    date_time = '2019-05-03 09:00:00'
    target = datetime.strptime(date_time, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

    now = datetime.now()

    delta = target - now

    if delta > timedelta(0):
        print('Will sleep {} : {}'.format(date_time, delta))
        time.sleep(delta.total_seconds())

and I am not sure how I can make the function to do - 1 minute. I am not sure if its even possible?

Answer 1

It appears you meant to use the formatted datetime variable called target in your if clause but instead you used the string representation of that date called date_time .

Use the datetime object instead and substract timedelta(minutes=1)

Working example:

date_time = '2019-05-03 09:00:00'
target = datetime.strptime(date_time, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

now = datetime.now()

delta = target - now

if delta > timedelta(0):
    target = target - timedelta(minutes=1)
    print('Will sleep {} : {}'.format(target, delta))
    time.sleep(delta.total_seconds())

Answer 2

If you would like to use the current time to determine your output

import datetime, time
from datetime import timedelta

daytime = '2019-05-03 09:00:00'
target = datetime.datetime.strptime(daytime, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
print (datetime.datetime.now())

now = datetime.datetime.now()
new_time = target-now

if  new_time > datetime.timedelta(0):
        print('Will sleep {} : {}'.format(daytime, new_time))
        time.sleep(new_time.total_seconds())