On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Scott W Dunning <swdunn...@cox.net> wrote: > On Feb 8, 2014, at 5:56 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Carry on with that method - work out the number of minutes, and then >> the "hours_etc" which has the rest. Then do the same to split off >> hours, and then days. See how you go! > > I did it similar to that but I went backwards. I started with number of > weeks and went down to seconds remaining. Would the result still be the same > if the order of the code went the other way (i.e.. from minutes to weeks > instead of the way I did it from weeks to seconds)? >
The result will be the same. You can work either way. Working from the smallest up lets you work in different formats - maybe you want to suppress "0 weeks, 0 days" if it's less than a day, for instance. Working from the largest down means you can simply write things out as you get them, and they'll be in the right order for a human to read (look back up to my aside where I show assembly-language number display, and you'll see that the digits come out in the wrong order). >> [1] For the purposes of this exercise, I'm pretending that this is >> Unix time and has no leap seconds. Technically, when you write out >> HH:MM:SS, the HH field can go from 00 to 23, the MM field can go from >> 00 to 59, and the SS field can go from 00 to 61 - yes, it's possible >> to have *two* consecutive leap seconds, although this has never yet >> happened. But for this, we're working in a system that has seconds >> going from 00 to 59 > > > I honestly do not know what leap seconds are but I’ll take your word for it. > lol Heh. I mentioned them for completeness only. Look 'em up on Wikipedia if you like; some years are a smidge longer than 365 or 366 days, by either one or two seconds. Almost NEVER significant to every-day work, but you'll see some time formatting libraries that mention them (mainly because the SS field can go up to 61). ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
