I want to extract the sunrise hour and if I do the following
sun = ephem.Sun()
r1 = home.next_rising(sun)
print ("Visual sunrise %s" % r1)
risehr = r1[10:12]
print ("Rise Hour = %s" % risehr)
I got the error
>>'ephem.Date' object has no attribute '__getitem__'
I can print the string r1 but not extract from it (?)
I tried solutions from similar problem posts on extraction but couldn't make any progress, apologies if this appears to be a double post.
As I understand your question you want to print only hour of sunrise. r1 is object of ephem.Date type. You could make it with brute force
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risehr = str(r1)[10:12]
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or you could convert r1 object to datetime, and datetime to str representation
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risehr = r1.datetime().strftime('%H')
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or convert it to tuple first
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risehr = r1.tuple()[3]
...
All available options you could read at this page in section Conversions.
@kvorobiev answered the question of how to extract from a string representation of your data. But the other half of your question was the error:
'ephem.Date' object has no attribute '__getitem__'
According to the PyEphem documentation for the next_rising() function,
If the search is successful, returns a Date value.
Furthermore, Date objects have an important property:
Dates are stored and returned as floats. Only when printed, passed to str(), or formatted with '%s' does a date express itself as a string giving the calendar day and time.
When you gave the command risehr = r1[10:12], the Python interpreter attempted to get call Date.getattr() to get the fields from a Date object corresponding to the slice 10:12. Without that method, slicing has no meaning to a Date object.
But all is not lost! You can still get the Date object's time information:
Call .tuple() to split a date into its year, month, day, hour, minute, and second.
You can then slice this tuple as needed to get the hour:
hour = r1.tuple()[3]
Or exhaustively:
year, month, day, hour, minute, second = r1.tuple()
