Thank you again to everyone; I greatly appreciate the help. I ended with essentially what Christian advised and it seems to work fine. FWIW, below is the rouine (I couldn't figure out how to do it without the kludgy x variable). The background is that this is a Django context processor that makes available the time until the next 2:30 because that is when the web site is rebuilt.
I hope the code isn't too much mangled by the online editor, Jim ............................................................................. import time, datetime from django.conf import settings WARNING_MINS=10 # How many mins before update time should start warning? WARNING_SECS=60*WARNING_MINS def current_time_processor(req): """Add current time information to the Context """ # Calculate time until the next 2:30 am x=datetime.datetime(2010,7,23) # actual date doesn't matter? dt_localtime=x.fromtimestamp(time.time()) dt_twothirty=dt_localtime.replace(hour=settings.UPDATE_TIME_HOURS,minute=settings.UPDATE_TIME_MINS,second=0,microsecond=0) dd_diff=dt_twothirty-dt_localtime secs_until_twothirty=dd_diff.seconds if secs_until_twothirty<WARNING_SECS: w='This site shuts down every night at %02d:%02d local time, to refresh the database. There are fewer than %d minutes until that shutdown. If you have not completed your work when the site shuts down then you will lose your work.' % (settings.UPDATE_TIME_HOURS,settings.UPDATE_TIME_MINS,WARNING_MINS,) else: w=None return {'CURRENT_LOCAL_TIME': time.asctime(time.localtime()), 'TIME_WARNING':w} -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list