Day 060 - Project 60 : Event countdown tracker

Code Help 100 Days of Code
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If you have any questions, comments or issues with this project please post them here!

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Hi, I was able to do the challenge but unsure why when finding the difference, we donā€™t use the timedelta function?

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My solution worked, but was different from Davidā€™s. I didnā€™t use the .days parameter.

I asked ChatGPT about it, and learned something.
For reference, Davidā€™s code and my code.

DAVIDā€™S SOLUTION:

import datetime

today = datetime.date.today()

print("EVENT COUNTDOWN")
day = int(input("Day: "))
month = int(input("Month: "))
year = int(input("Year: "))
event = datetime.date(year, month, day)

difference = event - today
difference = difference.days

if difference>0:
  print(f"{difference} days to go")
elif difference<0:
  print(f"šŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­ You missed it by {difference} days!")
  
else:
  print("šŸ„³šŸ„³šŸ„³šŸ„³šŸ„³šŸ„³šŸ„³ Today!")

My solution:

import datetime

today = datetime.date.today() 

holiday = input("What's the event?\n> ").capitalize()
year = int(input("What's the year\n> "))
month = int(input("What's the month\n> "))
day = int(input("Input the day\n> "))

holidate = datetime.date(year, month, day)


difference = abs(holidate - today)

print(today)
print(holidate)
print(difference)

if holidate > today:
  print(f"You have {difference} days until {holiday}!")
elif holidate < today:
  print(f"It's been {difference} days since {holiday}!")
else:
  print(f"{holiday} is today!")

ChatGPTā€™s thoughts:

In Python, when you subtract two datetime.date objects, the result is a datetime.timedelta object, which represents the difference between two dates as a duration.

In Davidā€™s code, the line difference = event - today calculates the difference between event and today, resulting in a datetime.timedelta object. To extract the number of days from the timedelta object and convert it to an integer, the .days attribute is used: difference = difference.days.

On the other hand, in your code, you used abs(holidate - today) to calculate the difference between holidate and today. Here, the abs() function returns an absolute value, which results in a datetime.timedelta object. However, in your code, you didnā€™t extract the .days attribute, and thatā€™s why your code worked without crashing.

The difference in behavior can be attributed to how you used the difference variable in your code. In Davidā€™s code, difference is used later in the conditional statements, which require an integer comparison. Therefore, the .days attribute is necessary to convert the timedelta object to an integer.

In your code, you printed the difference directly without any further calculations or comparisons, so you didnā€™t encounter any issues. However, if you were to use difference in integer comparisons or calculations later in your code, you might need to use .days as well.

To summarize, the .days attribute is used to extract the number of days from a timedelta object as an integer. Itā€™s necessary if you need to perform integer comparisons or calculations with the result.

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ā€œholidateā€¦ā€ this is amazing lol

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