Python timedelta seconds vs total_seconds

Question

Looking at the datetime docs, I can't seem to get the difference between the attribute `seconds` and the method `total_seconds()` used on a timedelta object. Is it just precision? That the former is an int and the latter a float? Or am I missing something?

Accepted Answer

You can construct a `timedelta` from days, seconds, microseconds, milliseconds, minutes, hours and weeks. Please note the order of these parameters, which is absolutely not useful and probably caused historically.

Internally, the `timedelta` structure is only made up of days, seconds and microseconds. And these are the properties you can access once the `timedelta` has been built. Even if you used hours, minutes etc. to construct the object, that information is gone.

```
import datetime

t = datetime.timedelta(hours=2, minutes=30)
print(t.seconds)
```

If seconds become larger than 86400 (24*60*60), they will overflow into one day:

```
import datetime

t = datetime.timedelta(hours=24, minutes=1)
print(t.seconds)
print(t.days)
```

And thus, `timespan.seconds` is quite a useless property, because it's only a part of the truth and meaningless without the other two components. The same applies for `timespan.days` and `timespan.microseconds`. They should really have been made internal and thus adhere to the principle of information hiding.

`total_seconds()` on the other hand side, is a valid representation of the timespan. It considers all 3 properties combined into a single number.

Python timedelta seconds vs total_seconds

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