What did they change in datetime/strptime/timestamp to bork my template binary sensor?

Configuration
1

Hi all,

I’m hoping someone knows off the top of their head what they changed since about April '22 which broke my template sensor which is simply supposed to return a “true” if there is a calendar event in the next 2 days, and a “false” otherwise.

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      reminders_label:
        value_template: >-
          {{(((( as_timestamp(strptime(state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time'),"%F %T")) - as_timestamp(now())) / 86400)|round(2)) < 2)  }}

If I put just

{{ as_timestamp(strptime(state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time'),"%F %T")) }}

into the template editor, I get the error:

ValueError: Template error: strptime got invalid input '2022-09-04 13:00:00' when rendering template '{{ as_timestamp(strptime(state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time'),"%F %T")) }}' but no default was specified

So I’m guessing the output from the state_attr has somehow changed it’s type/format, but I’m not sure how, so I’m not sure what to do to fix it. Anyone have any idea?

2

Just need to add default at the end I believe

 86400)|round(2)) < 2) | default() }}

Or perhaps default(none)

1 Like
3

Tried both with default() and default(none) and it produces the same error. What is the default acomplishing?

4 
strptime(state_attr('calendar.andy_calendar','start_time'),'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

This works for me (for coping with the parsing part of the template)

Incidentally I looked at datetime — Basic date and time types — Python 3.8.13 documentation and I can’t see where %F %T came from…

5

%F and %T are there
https://cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/strftime/

%T	ISO 8601 time format (HH:MM:SS), equivalent to %H:%M:%S	14:55:02

%F Short YYYY-MM-DD date, equivalent to %Y-%m-%d 2001-08-23

default() is supposed to set the “unknown value” to my understanding. I am not very proficient in templating I must say. I think you can do … default if broken text then make fixed text…
But to be honest I would usually have to ask…

meh also tired.

your timestamp is wrong format
needs to be YYYYmmddTHHMMSSz
you needs a separator T and tz info

'2022-09-04T13:00:00+0000'
6

Interesting, that format will have never worked. You’ve just been getting lucky.

Anyways, here’s a simpler approach.

{{ (state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time') | as_datetime | as_local - now()).days < 2 }}

If you’re dead set on using as_timestamp…

{{ (as_timestamp(state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time')) - now().timestamp()) / 86400 < 2 }}
7

It worked for more than a year, but I guess I was just getting lucky the whole time.

This one worked:

{{ (state_attr('calendar.alena_and_seans_calendar', 'start_time') | as_datetime | as_local - now()).days < 2 }}

I’ll take it, and I’m glad that I know I’m doing it right now. Thank you.

What does the as_local do?

8

as local time instead of gmt (Greenwich mean time or utc basically)

1 Like