elapsedtimer 0.1

Elapsed timer and utilities

Python elapsed time utilities.

The main interface to this package is an ElapsedTimer class. This class will use the highest resolution timer available to Python depending on the OS, either time.time() or time.clock(). Its purpose is easily to measure and print the duration of a task, and is normally meant to be used as a context manager.

Basic example:

>>> with ElapsedTimer('say hello'):
...     print 'hi there!'
hi there!
13.113 µs: say hello

The constructor for ElapsedTimer takes an optional string describing the operation being performed. It also optionally accepts a file object to change where the resulting duration message will be printed. The output file defaults to sys.stdout.

You can control an ElapsedTimer instance directly instead of using it as a context manager. It has start() and stop() methods. The stop() method will not print the duration for you like exiting a context manager instance does.

There is an elapsed property that returns the elapsed time since start() was called or the context manager entered. A timedelta property is also available that returns the elapsed time as a datetime.timedelta object instead of a float, though note that this class this only has microsecond resolution.

In addition to ElapsedTimer, there are some utilities. The format_duration() function takes a duration in seconds and returns a string with the most human-readable duration and time units. The units are selected such that there will be between 1 and 3 digits before the decimal point.

There is a module-level enable variable that acts as a global enable switch for all printing of results by ElapsedTimer. It defaults to True.

License

This package is licensed under the BSD three-clause license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Copyright © 2014-2015 Chris Reed.