Python function to convert seconds into minutes, hours, and days

Question

Question: Write a program that asks the user to enter a number of seconds, and works as follows:

• There are 60 seconds in a minute. If the number of seconds

Answer 1

Patching Mr.B's answer (sorry, not enough rep. to comment), we can return variable granularity based on the amount of time. For example, we don't say "1 week, 5 seconds", we just say "1 week":

def display_time(seconds, granularity=2):
    result = []

    for name, count in intervals:
        value = seconds // count
        if value:
            seconds -= value * count
            if value == 1:
                name = name.rstrip('s')
            result.append("{} {}".format(value, name))
        else:
            # Add a blank if we're in the middle of other values
            if len(result) > 0:
                result.append(None)
    return ', '.join([x for x in result[:granularity] if x is not None])

Some sample input:

for diff in [5, 67, 3600, 3605, 3667, 24*60*60, 24*60*60+5, 24*60*60+57, 24*60*60+3600, 24*60*60+3667, 2*24*60*60, 2*24*60*60+5*60*60, 7*24*60*60, 7*24*60*60 + 24*60*60]:
    print "For %d seconds: %s" % (diff, display_time(diff, 2))

...returns this output:

For 5 seconds: 5 seconds
For 67 seconds: 1 minute, 7 seconds
For 3600 seconds: 1 hour
For 3605 seconds: 1 hour
For 3667 seconds: 1 hour, 1 minute
For 86400 seconds: 1 day
For 86405 seconds: 1 day
For 86457 seconds: 1 day
For 90000 seconds: 1 day, 1 hour
For 90067 seconds: 1 day, 1 hour
For 172800 seconds: 2 days
For 190800 seconds: 2 days, 5 hours
For 604800 seconds: 1 week
For 691200 seconds: 1 week, 1 day