Slicing a list based on time in element of the list

Python Help
1

I have list of links and have extracted the timestamp from the link and put at the start of each element of the list. In total 478 elements in the list.

[01:00:38 link1’, 01:01:38 link2’, … ‘23:57:39 link478’]

I now want to be able to slice the list based on the timestamp. So for example if I wanted only to extract a time range from 03:00 to 07:00. How could this be achieved ?

2

You could convert the time to an int and then select elements based on the int range.
For example 03:00 is 36060 seconds.

If your time strings are always well formed you can use string comparison.
time >= '03:00:00 and time < '07:00:00' for example.

You can use a list comprehension to loop over the elements of your list and select the ones you need. See 5. Data Structures — Python 3.13.2 documentation

3

Hello,

if you want to extract elements from your list that fall within a certain lower and upper bound timestamps, you can try something like the following script:

# Arbitrary list for test purpose
list_of_links= [ '01:00:38 link1', '01:01:02 link1', '04:01:35 link1', '04:25:06 link1',
                 '05:08:44 link1', '06:12:14 link1', '06:17:51 link1', '02:38:24 link1']

# List to save qualified 
timestamp_list = []

from datetime import datetime

# Create lower and upper timestamp time objects
time_lower_ref = datetime.strptime('03:00:00', "%H:%M:%S").time()
time_upper_ref = datetime.strptime('07:00:00', "%H:%M:%S").time()

# Loop through all the elements in your 'list of links'
for index in range(len(list_of_links)):

    # Read each element and extract only the timestamp
    date_string = list_of_links[index].split(" ")[0]
    # Convert to time object
    time_object = datetime.strptime(date_string, "%H:%M:%S").time()

    # Compare each element with lower and upper boundaries
    if time_object >= time_lower_ref and time_object <= time_upper_ref:
        timestamp_list.append(list_of_links[index])

print(timestamp_list)

I have added comments so that you can follow along.
As is, you can replace your list into the test script and it should work.

Whan I ran the script, I got the following list:

['04:01:35 link1', '04:25:06 link1', '05:08:44 link1', '06:12:14 link1', '06:17:51 link1']

They’re all within the lower and upper timestamp boundaries.