How to Convert Seconds to Hours, Minutes and Seconds in Python

In this article, we will learn to convert seconds to hours, minutes, and seconds in Python. We will use some built-in modules available and some custom codes as well to see them working. Let's first have a quick look over what are dates in Python.

Python Date

In Python, we can work on Date functions by importing a built-in module datetime available in Python. We have date objects to work with dates. This datetime module contains dates in the form of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and microsecond. The datetime module has many methods to return information about the date object. It requires date, month, and year values to compute the function. Date and time functions are compared like mathematical expressions between various numbers.

Convert seconds to hours, minutes, and seconds

In Python, the date and time module provides various functions for the manipulation of dates. We can also convert seconds into hours, minutes, and seconds by applying mathematical operations. Let us discuss the various ways to perform the conversion.

Example: Using Simple Mathematical Calculations

It calculates seconds, hours, and minutes individually from the given seconds. Hour is calculated by floor division (//) of seconds by 3600. Minutes are calculated by floor division of remaining seconds. Seconds are also calculated by the remainder of hour and minutes calculation. In the print statement, string formatting is done to print in the preferred format.

seconds = 12601

seconds = seconds % (24 * 3600)
hour = seconds // 3600
seconds %= 3600
minutes = seconds // 60
seconds %= 60

print("%d:%02d:%02d" % (hour, minutes, seconds))

3:30:01

Example: Using divmod() function

The below example uses divmod() function. This function performs a single division and results in the quotient and the remainder.

seconds = 31045

minutes, seconds = divmod(seconds, 60)
hours, minutes = divmod(minutes, 60)

print("%d:%02d:%02d" % (hours, minutes, seconds))

8:37:25

Example: Using datetime Module

The datetime module of Python provides datetime.timedelta() function to convert seconds into hours, minutes, and seconds. It takes seconds as an argument and prints the seconds in the preferred format.

The timedelta(seconds) is called to convert seconds to a timedelta object and str(object) is called with timedelta object to return a string representing seconds as hours, minutes, and seconds.

import datetime
sec = 9506
convert = str(datetime.timedelta(seconds = sec))
print(convert)

2:38:26

Example: Using the time module

The time module of Python provides datetime.strftime() function to convert seconds into hours, minutes, and seconds. It takes time format and time.gmtime() function as arguments.

strftime() - It prints the seconds in the preferred format.

gmtime() - It is used to convert seconds to the specified format that strftime() requires.

import time

seconds = 52910

convert = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S", time.gmtime(seconds))

print(convert)

14:41:50

Conclusion

In this article, we learned to convert seconds into hours, minutes, and seconds format by using datetime module, time module and two simple mathematical approaches. We used some custom codes as well to better understand the working of each method.