How to make a timer program in Python

Question

Here is my goal: To make a small program (text based) that will start with a greeting, print out a timer for how long it has been since the last event, and then a timer for the

Answer 1

I would go with something like this:

import time
import sys

time_start = time.time()
seconds = 0
minutes = 0

while True:
    try:
        sys.stdout.write("\r{minutes} Minutes {seconds} Seconds".format(minutes=minutes, seconds=seconds))
        sys.stdout.flush()
        time.sleep(1)
        seconds = int(time.time() - time_start) - minutes * 60
        if seconds >= 60:
            minutes += 1
            seconds = 0
    except KeyboardInterrupt, e:
        break

Here I am relying on actual time module rather than just sleep incrementer since sleep won't be exactly 1 second.

Also, you can probably use print instead of sys.stdout.write, but you will almost certainly need sys.stdout.flush still.

Like:

print ("\r{minutes} Minutes {seconds} Seconds".format(minutes=minutes, seconds=seconds)),

Note the trailing comma so a new line is not printed.