How to convert YouTube API duration to seconds?

Question

For the sake of interest I want to convert video durations from YouTubes ISO 8601 to seconds. To future proof my solution, I picked a really long video to test it a

Answer 1

Here's my answer which takes 9000's regex solution (thank you - amazing mastery of regex!) and finishes the job for the original poster's YouTube use case i.e. converting hours, minutes, and seconds to seconds. I used .groups() instead of .groupdict(), followed by a couple of lovingly constructed list comprehensions.

import re

def yt_time(duration="P1W2DT6H21M32S"):
    """
    Converts YouTube duration (ISO 8061)
    into Seconds

    see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Durations
    """
    ISO_8601 = re.compile(
        'P'   # designates a period
        '(?:(?P\d+)Y)?'   # years
        '(?:(?P\d+)M)?'  # months
        '(?:(?P\d+)W)?'   # weeks
        '(?:(?P\d+)D)?'    # days
        '(?:T' # time part must begin with a T
        '(?:(?P\d+)H)?'   # hours
        '(?:(?P\d+)M)?' # minutes
        '(?:(?P\d+)S)?' # seconds
        ')?')   # end of time part
    # Convert regex matches into a short list of time units
    units = list(ISO_8601.match(duration).groups()[-3:])
    # Put list in ascending order & remove 'None' types
    units = list(reversed([int(x) if x != None else 0 for x in units]))
    # Do the maths
    return sum([x*60**units.index(x) for x in units])

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