Convert seconds to hours/minutes/seconds and pretty print

Question

I'm self taught in python 3, and I frequently keep track of how long my scripts have been running using the time library.

import time
startTime = time.time()

#The main body of script...

print('The script finished in {0} seconds'.format(time.time() - startTime)

However this can be unhelpful if the script has been running for some time, an example output being:

'The script has been running for 4323.580279111862 seconds'

I wrote a function which takes a float variable and prints the time in a more readable way. I convert the seconds to integer to get rid of the 12 decimal places, and I can pass a boolean value which changes the wording of the print to indicate that the script is still running or has finished.

def printRuntime(seconds,finished=False):
    seconds = int(seconds)
    status = 'has been running for'
    if finished == True:
        status = 'finished in'

    if seconds < 60:
        print('The script {} {} seconds'.format(status,seconds))
        return
    elif seconds < 3600:
        minutes = seconds // 60
        seconds = seconds - 60*minutes
        print('The script {} {} minutes & {} seconds'.format(status,minutes,seconds))
        return
    else:
        hours = seconds // 3600
        minutes = (seconds - 3600*hours) // 60
        seconds = seconds - 3600*hours - 60*minutes
        print('The script {} {} hours, {} minutes & {} seconds'.format(status,hours,minutes,seconds))
        return

import time
startTime = time.time()

#The main body of script...

printRuntime(time.time() - startTime)

Since I'm self taught I have no real idea about best practice. I feel like there must be a more concise way of doing this, what mistakes am I making?

Answer 1

There is a built-in timeit module which is quite convenient for measuring execution times, but, if we were to improve this particular solution, I would switch to using divmod as suggested by Brandon here, utilize short if/else version for the status definition and join the time value parts with a comma filtering non-zero values only.

Something along these lines:

seconds = int(seconds)
status = 'has been running for' if not finished else 'finished in'

minutes, seconds = divmod(seconds, 60)
hours, minutes = divmod(minutes, 60)

periods = [('hours', hours), ('minutes', minutes), ('seconds', seconds)]
time_string = ', '.join('{} {}'.format(value, name)
                        for name, value in periods
                        if value)

print('The script {} {}'.format(status, time_string))

Answer 2

I am also self-taught and do it much the same as you.

For a different reason (wanted to periodically run functions) I was looking for "time until execute" logging, anyway, I codged this together after reading several examples (including this page).

def secs_to_dhms(seconds):
    from datetime import datetime, timedelta    
    d = datetime(1,1,1) + timedelta(seconds=int(seconds))
    output = "{:02}:{:02}:{:02}:{:02}" .format(d.day-1, d.hour, d.minute, d.second)
    return output

Not exactly what you wanted, but maybe of use to you, anyway.