Format timedelta to string

Question

I'm having trouble formatting a datetime.timedelta object.

Here's what I'm trying to do: I have a list of objects and one of the members of the class of the object is a timedelta object that shows the duration of an event. I would like to display that duration in the format of hours:minutes.

I have tried a variety of methods for doing this and I'm having difficulty. My current approach is to add methods to the class for my objects that return hours and minutes. I can get the hours by dividing the timedelta.seconds by 3600 and rounding it. I'm having trouble with getting the remainder seconds and converting that to minutes.

By the way, I'm using Google AppEngine with Django Templates for presentation.

Solution 1

Thanks everyone for your help. I took many of your ideas and put them together, let me know what you think.

I added two methods to the class like this:

def hours(self):
    retval = ""
    if self.totalTime:
        hoursfloat = self.totalTime.seconds / 3600
        retval = round(hoursfloat)
    return retval

def minutes(self):
    retval = ""
    if self.totalTime:
        minutesfloat = self.totalTime.seconds / 60
        hoursAsMinutes = self.hours() * 60
        retval = round(minutesfloat - hoursAsMinutes)
    return retval

In my django I used this (sum is the object and it is in a dictionary):

<td>{{ sum.0 }}</td>    
<td>{{ sum.1.hours|stringformat:"d" }}:{{ sum.1.minutes|stringformat:"#02.0d" }}</td>

Solution 2

You can just convert the timedelta to a string with str(). Here's an example:

import datetime
start = datetime.datetime(2009,2,10,14,00)
end   = datetime.datetime(2009,2,10,16,00)
delta = end-start
print(str(delta))
# prints 2:00:00

Solution 3

As you know, you can get the total_seconds from a timedelta object by accessing the .seconds attribute.

Python provides the builtin function divmod() which allows for:

s = 13420
hours, remainder = divmod(s, 3600)
minutes, seconds = divmod(remainder, 60)
print '{:02}:{:02}:{:02}'.format(int(hours), int(minutes), int(seconds))
# result: 03:43:40

or you can convert to hours and remainder by using a combination of modulo and subtraction:

# arbitrary number of seconds
s = 13420
# hours
hours = s // 3600 
# remaining seconds
s = s - (hours * 3600)
# minutes
minutes = s // 60
# remaining seconds
seconds = s - (minutes * 60)
# total time
print '{:02}:{:02}:{:02}'.format(int(hours), int(minutes), int(seconds))
# result: 03:43:40

Solution 4

>>> str(datetime.timedelta(hours=10.56))
10:33:36

>>> td = datetime.timedelta(hours=10.505) # any timedelta object
>>> ':'.join(str(td).split(':')[:2])
10:30

Passing the timedelta object to the str() function calls the same formatting code used if we simply type print td. Since you don't want the seconds, we can split the string by colons (3 parts) and put it back together with only the first 2 parts.

Solution 5

def td_format(td_object):
    seconds = int(td_object.total_seconds())
    periods = [
        ('year',        60*60*24*365),
        ('month',       60*60*24*30),
        ('day',         60*60*24),
        ('hour',        60*60),
        ('minute',      60),
        ('second',      1)
    ]

    strings=[]
    for period_name, period_seconds in periods:
        if seconds > period_seconds:
            period_value , seconds = divmod(seconds, period_seconds)
            has_s = 's' if period_value > 1 else ''
            strings.append("%s %s%s" % (period_value, period_name, has_s))

    return ", ".join(strings)

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