How to calculate the time interval between two time strings

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Yes, definitely datetime is what you need here. Specifically, the datetime.strptime() method, which parses a string into a datetime object.

from datetime import datetime
s1 = '10:33:26'
s2 = '11:15:49' # for example
FMT = '%H:%M:%S'
tdelta = datetime.strptime(s2, FMT) - datetime.strptime(s1, FMT)

That gets you a timedelta object that contains the difference between the two times. You can do whatever you want with that, e.g. converting it to seconds or adding it to another datetime.

This will return a negative result if the end time is earlier than the start time, for example s1 = 12:00:00 and s2 = 05:00:00. If you want the code to assume the interval crosses midnight in this case (i.e. it should assume the end time is never earlier than the start time), you can add the following lines to the above code:

if tdelta.days < 0:
    tdelta = timedelta(
        days=0,
        seconds=tdelta.seconds,
        microseconds=tdelta.microseconds
    )

(of course you need to include from datetime import timedelta somewhere). Thanks to J.F. Sebastian for pointing out this use case.

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