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Posted By

wbowers on 04/05/08


Tagged

time human readable python function seconds elapsedtime


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taboularasa


Python: elapsed_time (human readable time span given total seconds)

Published in: Python 

This function takes an amount of time in seconds and returns a human readable time span (i.e., 4h 5m 23s). The suffixes (d for day, h for hour) are configurable to whatever you want (like day, hour, week, etc). Read the comments within the code for more detail.

Plain TextExpand 
  1. def elapsed_time(seconds, suffixes=['y','w','d','h','m','s'], add_s=False, separator=' '):
  2. 	"""
  3. 	Takes an amount of seconds and turns it into a human-readable amount of time.
  4. 	"""
  5. 	# the formatted time string to be returned
  6. 	time = []
  7.  
  8. 	# the pieces of time to iterate over (days, hours, minutes, etc)
  9. 	# - the first piece in each tuple is the suffix (d, h, w)
  10. 	# - the second piece is the length in seconds (a day is 60s * 60m * 24h)
  11. 	parts = [(suffixes[0], 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 52),
  12. 		  (suffixes[1], 60 * 60 * 24 * 7),
  13. 		  (suffixes[2], 60 * 60 * 24),
  14. 		  (suffixes[3], 60 * 60),
  15. 		  (suffixes[4], 60),
  16. 		  (suffixes[5], 1)]
  17.  
  18. 	# for each time piece, grab the value and remaining seconds, and add it to
  19. 	# the time string
  20. 	for suffix, length in parts:
  21. 		value = seconds / length
  22. 		if value > 0:
  23. 			seconds = seconds % length
  24. 			time.append('%s%s' % (str(value),
  25. 					       (suffix, (suffix, suffix + 's')[value > 1])[add_s]))
  26. 		if seconds < 1:
  27. 			break
  28.  
  29. 	return separator.join(time)
  30.  
  31. if __name__ == '__main__':
  32. 	# 2 years, 1 week, 6 days, 2 hours, 59 minutes, 23 seconds
  33. 	# 2y 1w 6d 2h 59m 23s
  34. 	seconds = (60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 52 * 2) + (60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 1) + (60 * 60 * 24 * 6) + (60 * 60 * 2) + (60 * 59) + (1 * 23)
  35. 	print elapsed_time(seconds)
  36. 	print elapsed_time(seconds, [' year',' week',' day',' hour',' minute',' second'])
  37. 	print elapsed_time(seconds, [' year',' week',' day',' hour',' minute',' second'], add_s=True)
  38. 	print elapsed_time(seconds, [' year',' week',' day',' hour',' minute',' second'], add_s=True, separator=', ')

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