Jon Ribbens <jon+use...@unequivocal.eu> writes: > On 2022-04-19, Loris Bennett <loris.benn...@fu-berlin.de> wrote: >> I now realise that timedelta is not really what I need. I am interested >> solely in pure periods, i.e. numbers of seconds, > > That's exactly what timedelta is. > >> that I can convert back and forth from a format such as >> >> 11-22::44:55 > > I don't recognise that format and can't work out what it means. > It should be trivial to write functions to parse whatever format > you wanted and convert between it and timedelta objects though.
days-hours:minutes:seconds >> It is obviously fairly easy to rustle up something to do this, but I am >> surprised that this is not baked into Python (such a class also seems to >> be missing from R). > > I would be very surprised if any language supported the arbitrary format > above you happen to be interested in! But most languages support fairly arbitrary formatting of timedate-style objects. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that such formatting might be available for simple periods. >> I would have thought that periods crop up all over >> the place and therefore formatting as strings and parsing of string >> would be supported natively by most modern languages. Apparently not. > > I think most languages think that a simple number suffices to represent > a fixed time period (commonly seconds or milliseconds). And if you want > more dynamic intervals (e.g. x months y days) then there is insufficient > consensus as to what that actually means. Maybe. It just seems to me that once you get up to more than a few hundred seconds, the ability to convert and from a more readable format becomes very useful. The length of a month may be unclear, but the definitions for year, week, day, hours, and minute are all trivial. Cheers, Loris -- This signature is currently under construction. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
