Just be careful when dividing by 60: division between integers returns an integer ->
12/60 = 0 unless you import division from future.
The following is copy and pasted from Python 2.6.2:
You can--and probably should--store this as a timedelta rather than an int, but that's a separate issue and timedelta doesn't actually make this particular task any easier.
I can't believe any of the many answers gives what I'd consider the "one obvious way to do it" (and I'm not even Dutch...!-) -- up to just below 24 hours' worth of seconds (86399 seconds, specifically):
>>> import time
>>> time.strftime('%H:%M:%S', time.gmtime(12345))
'03:25:45'
Doing it in a Django template's more finicky, since the time filter supports a funky time-formatting syntax (inspired, I believe, from PHP), and also needs the datetime module, and a timezone implementation such as pytz, to prep the data. For example:
If you use divmod, you are immune to different flavors of integer division:
# show time strings for 3800 seconds
# easy way to get mm:ss
print "%02d:%02d" % divmod(3800, 60)
# easy way to get hh:mm:ss
print "%02d:%02d:%02d" % \
reduce(lambda ll,b : divmod(ll[0],b) + ll[1:],
[(3800,),60,60])
# function to convert floating point number of seconds to
# hh:mm:ss.sss
def secondsToStr(t):
return "%02d:%02d:%02d.%03d" % \
reduce(lambda ll,b : divmod(ll[0],b) + ll[1:],
[(round(t*1000),),1000,60,60])
print secondsToStr(3800.123)
If you need to do this a lot, you can precalculate all possible strings for number of seconds in a day:
try:
from itertools import product
except ImportError:
def product(*seqs):
if len(seqs) == 1:
for p in seqs[0]:
yield p,
else:
for s in seqs[0]:
for p in product(*seqs[1:]):
yield (s,) + p
hhmmss = []
for (h, m, s) in product(range(24), range(60), range(60)):
hhmmss.append("%02d:%02d:%02d" % (h, m, s))
Now conversion of seconds to format string is a fast indexed lookup:
print hhmmss[12345]
prints
'03:25:45'
EDIT:
Updated to 2020, removing Py2 compatibility ugliness, and f-strings!
import sys
from itertools import product
hhmmss = [f"{h:02d}:{m:02d}:{s:02d}"
for h, m, s in product(range(24), range(60), range(60))]
# we can still just index into the list, but define as a function
# for common API with code below
seconds_to_str = hhmmss.__getitem__
print(seconds_to_str(12345))
How much memory does this take? sys.getsizeof of a list won't do, since it will just give us the size of the list and its str refs, but not include the memory of the strs themselves:
# how big is a list of 24*60*60 8-character strs?
list_size = sys.getsizeof(hhmmss) + sum(sys.getsizeof(s) for s in hhmmss)
print("{:,}".format(list_size))
prints:
5,657,616
What if we just had one big str? Every value is exactly 8 characters long, so we can slice into this str and get the correct str for second X of the day:
hhmmss_str = ''.join([f"{h:02d}:{m:02d}:{s:02d}"
for h, m, s in product(range(24),
range(60),
range(60))])
def seconds_to_str(n):
loc = n * 8
return hhmmss_str[loc: loc+8]
print(seconds_to_str(12345))
Did that save any space?
# how big is a str of 24*60*60*8 characters?
str_size = sys.getsizeof(hhmmss_str)
print("{:,}".format(str_size))
prints:
691,249
Reduced to about this much:
print(str_size / list_size)
prints:
0.12218026108523448
On the performance side, this looks like a classic memory vs. CPU tradeoff:
import timeit
print("\nindex into pre-calculated list")
print(timeit.timeit("hhmmss[6]", '''from itertools import product; hhmmss = [f"{h:02d}:{m:02d}:{s:02d}"
for h, m, s in product(range(24),
range(60),
range(60))]'''))
print("\nget slice from pre-calculated str")
print(timeit.timeit("hhmmss_str[6*8:7*8]", '''from itertools import product; hhmmss_str=''.join([f"{h:02d}:{m:02d}:{s:02d}"
for h, m, s in product(range(24),
range(60),
range(60))])'''))
print("\nuse datetime.timedelta from stdlib")
print(timeit.timeit("timedelta(seconds=6)", "from datetime import timedelta"))
print("\ninline compute of h, m, s using divmod")
print(timeit.timeit("n=6;m,s=divmod(n,60);h,m=divmod(m,60);f'{h:02d}:{m:02d}:{s:02d}'"))
On my machine I get:
index into pre-calculated list
0.0434853
get slice from pre-calculated str
0.1085147
use datetime.timedelta from stdlib
0.7625738
inline compute of h, m, s using divmod
2.0477764