Timedelta constructor with string parameter

[felipou at gmail.com]

Hello everyone!

I created some code recently to parse a string and create a timedelta from it.

Right now it only accepts positive integers, and only hours, minutes and seconds, but I think it could be easily extended to support everything that timedelta accepts.


time_delta_regex = re.compile(
    r'((?P<hours>\d+?)h)?((?P<minutes>\d+?)m)?((?P<seconds>\d+?)s)?' )

def parseTimeDelta( value ):
    timedelta_params = value

    if isinstance( value, basestring ):
        parts = time_delta_regex.match( value )
        if not parts:
            return None
        parts = parts.groupdict()

        timedelta_params = {}
        for ( name, param ) in parts.iteritems():
            if param:
                timedelta_params[ name ] = int( param )

    return datetime.timedelta( **timedelta_params )

parseTimeDelta("5h32m15s")


I was thinking this conversion could be very useful to lots of people, and so I thought about proposing it as an enhancement to the standard library.

But before doing anything, I thought it would be a good idea to see what people here think.

I think this would be a nice addition as a constructor of the timedelta class, but I'm not sure if it would conflict with any existing code. I can't see any downside to including this in the constructor or as a separate function.

So, what do you guys think?