[Tutor] displaying clock and/or elapsed time

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 11 May 2010 11:54:13 pm Art Kendall wrote:
> I am learning python and I want to see how long parts of of a process
> take.  Are there system variables that can just be displayed?
> how do I get variables that contain the wall time (x) and the elapsed
> time (y)?

Get the current time in seconds since the start of the universe (10am on 
January 1st 1970 on Linux systems, it may be slightly different on 
Windows or Macintosh):

>>> import time
>>> time.time()
1273588356.8070121


Get the current time in a more human-readable fashion:

>>> time.ctime()
'Wed May 12 00:33:22 2010'


Get the elapsed time:


>>> start = time.time()  # save the current time
>>> for i in range(1000):  # do some work
...     pass
...
>>> elapsed = time.time() - start
>>> print "work took %f seconds" % elapsed
work took 0.015870 seconds


See the documentation for the time module:

http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

That's a bit technical and newbie-unfriendly, so you might also like to 
read this:

http://effbot.org/librarybook/time.htm

although it's very old and parts of it are obsolete.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano