How to make a timer program in Python

Question

Here is my goal: To make a small program (text based) that will start with a greeting, print out a timer for how long it has been since the last event, and then a timer for the

Answer 1

The ideas are pretty cool on other posts -- however, the code was not useable for what I wanted to do.

I liked how people want to subtract time, in this way you don't have to have a time.sleep()

from datetime import datetime

timePoint = time.time()
count = 0
while (count < 10):
    timePoint2 = time.time()
    timePointSubtract = timePoint2 - timePoint
    timeStamp1 = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(timePointSubtract).strftime('%H:%M:%S')
    print(f'{count} and {timeStamp1}')
    val = input("")
    count = count + 1

So, pretty much I wanted to have a timer but at the same time keep track of how many times I pressed enter.

Answer 2

Use the timeit module to time your code. Then adjust the time.sleep(x) accordingly. For example, you could use one of the following:

import timeit
#Do all your code and time stuff and while loop
#Store that time in a variable named timedLoop
timer = 1- timedLoop

#Inside while loop:
   time.sleep(timer)

This will time the code you have other than the time.sleep, and subtract that from 1 second and will sleep for that amount of time. This will give an accurate representation of 1 second. Another way is less work, but may not be as accurate:

#set up timeit module in another program and time your code, then do this:
#In new program:
timer = 1 - timerLoop
print timerLoop

Run your program, then copy the printed time and paste it into program two, the one you have now. Use timerLoop in your time.sleep():

time.sleep(timerLoop)

That should fix your problem.

Answer 3

I have a better way:

import time
s=0
m=0
while True:
  print(m,  'minutes,', s, 'seconds')
  time.sleep(0.999999999999999999999) # the more 9s the better
  s += 1
  if s == 60:
    s=0
    m += 1

Answer 4

This seems like it would be MUCH easier:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime as dt
starttime = dt.now()
input("Mark end time")
endtime = dt.now()
print("Total time passed is {}.".format(endtime-starttime))

Answer 5

# This Is the Perfect Timer!(PS: This One Really Works!)
import sys
import time
import os

counter=0
s = 0
m = 0
n = int(input("Till How Many Seconds do you want the timer to be?: "))
print("")

while counter <= n:
    sys.stdout.write("\x1b[1A\x1b[2k")
    print(m, 'Minutes', s, 'Seconds')
    time.sleep(1)
    s += 1
    counter+=1
    if s == 60:
        m += 1
        s = 0

print("\nTime Is Over Sir! Timer Complete!\n")

Answer 6

Ok, I'll start with why your timer is lagging.

What happens in your program is that the time.sleep() call "sleeps" the program's operation for 1 second, once that second has elapsed your program begins execution again. But your program still needs time to execute all the other commands you've told it to do, so it takes 1s + Xs to actually perform all the operations. Although this is a very basic explanation, it's fundamentally why your timer isn't synchronous.

As for why you're constantly printing on a new line, the print() function has a pre-defined end of line character that it appends to any string it is given.

print(value, ..., sep=' ', end='\n', file=sys.stdout, flush=False)

You can overwrite this with anything by putting end="YourThing" in your print statement like so

for x in range(3):
    print("Test", end="")

The above example appends an empty string to the end of the line, so the output of the loop would be

"TestTestTest"

As for solving your timer problem, you should use something similar to

timePoint = time.time()

while True:

    #Convert time in seconds to a gmtime struct
    currentTime = time.gmtime(time.time() - timePoint))

    #Convert the gmtime struct to a string
    timeStr = time.strftime("%M minutes, %S seconds", currentTime)

    #Print the time string
    print(timeStr, end="")