How do you determine a processing time in Python?

Question

I\'m new to Python, and confused by the date/time documentation. I want to compute the time that it takes to perform a computation.

In java, I would write:

Answer 1

You can implement two tic() and tac() functions, where tic() captures the time which it is called, and tac() prints the time difference since tic() was called. Here is a short implementation:

import time

_start_time = time.time()

def tic():
    global _start_time 
    _start_time = time.time()

def tac():
    t_sec = round(time.time() - _start_time)
    (t_min, t_sec) = divmod(t_sec,60)
    (t_hour,t_min) = divmod(t_min,60) 
    print('Time passed: {}hour:{}min:{}sec'.format(t_hour,t_min,t_sec))

Now in your code you can use it as:

tic()
do_some_stuff()
tac()

and it will, for example, output:

Time passed: 0hour:7min:26sec

See also:

• Python's datetime library: https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html
• Python's time library: https://docs.python.org/2/library/time.html