I was looking for a simple intuitive way to parse a timedelta from a string. The best I could find feels clunky at best: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4628122/ Solution 1 looks like this: ``` from datetime import datetime, timedelta t = datetime.strptime('05:20:25', '%H:%M:%S') delta = timedelta(hours=t.hour, minutes=t.minute, seconds=t.second) ``` Solution 2 looks like this: ``` from datetime import datetime, timedelta t = datetime.strptime('05:20:25', '%H:%M:%S') delta = t - datetime.combine(t.date(), time.min) ``` Solution 3 looks like this: ``` from datetime import timedelta import re match = re.match(r'(?P<hours>\d{2}):(?P<minutes>\d{2}):(?P<seconds>\d{2})', '05:20:25') delta = timedelta(**match.groupdict()) ``` Formatting back to strings is as verbose: ``` string = f'{delta.hours:02d}:{delta.minutes:02d}:{delta.seconds:02d}' I think it would be nicer and more intuitive if timedelta had strptime and strftime like datetime has. ``` delta = timedelta.strptime('05:20:25', '%H:%M:%S') # timedelta(hours=5, minutes=20, seconds=25) string = delta.strftime('%H:%M:%S') # '05:20:25' ``` The reason I would like this in the standard lib (vs maintaining my own helpers) is that : a) it feels very natural, especially after years of using these methods on datetime. b) there's currently three ways to do it that I've seen in the wild (documented above). Having this in the std lib would help with the ZoP "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." (the "obvious" part of this statement is covered in (a)). I'm sure there's corner cases I'm not seeing that make this more complicated to implement than it seems... Let me know. Cheers, Thomas