It's not clear to me what the correct str should be. I think the desired format changes depending on the relative magnitude of the timedelta object. For small values (less than a day), I agree, the behavior is, well, odd. You can get around that easily enough:
>>> d = datetime.timedelta(seconds=-2) >>> str(d) '-1 day, 23:59:58' >>> "-%s" % -d '-0:00:02' The problem gets more challenging once you get into magnitudes > one day: >>> e = datetime.timedelta(days=-4, seconds=3605) >>> e datetime.timedelta(-4, 3605) >>> print e -4 days, 1:00:05 Hmmm... It's printing just what we said, negative four days, positive one hour, five minutes. Let's try the trick from above: >>> print -e 3 days, 22:59:55 >>> "-%s" % -e '-3 days, 22:59:55' Ehhh... not so much. The fundamental problem here is the scope of the minus sign. My trick assumes it applied to the entire string representation. It's clear that in the first case that it applies to the entire displayed value, as there are no spaces. In the second case, we know it only applies to the days, because it's spitting back exactly what I fed the constructor. So, that means the simple minus sign trick won't work in the third case. Complicating things are that timedelta objects are normalized internally so that the seconds field is always non-negative (explaining the weird "-1 day, 23:59:58" string representation of the first case). I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. For offsets of less than a day, I suppose you could argue that the string representation shouldn't include the "-1 day" bit. Beyond that, I think you kind of have to live with what it gives you. Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
