Handy short cut for formatting elapsed time in floating point seconds

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:09:01 -0700, Paul McGuire wrote:

> I am doing some simple timing of some elements of Python scripts, and
> the simplest is to just call time.time() before and after key elements
> of the script:
> 
> t1 = time.time()
> 
> # do lengthy operation
> 
> t2 = time.time()
> print "That took %f seconds" % (t2-t1)

I dispute that this is easiest. I think the timeit module is easier, and
more reliable.

You probably should be putting the lengthy operation in a function (you're
going to run the test more than once, right?), so you can do this:


import timeit
timeit.Timer("function()", "from __main__ import function").repeat()


or even:

s = """
# insert your code
# for the length operation
# here
"""
timeit.Timer(s, "").repeat()


Call help(timeit) for more details.


-- 
Steven.