Question

I’ve got a function to return a platform-dependent timestamp with high precision. Now I’d like to subtract 5 seconds from such a timestamp and am looking for the smartest way to achieve this.

This is the function:

def get_time():
   """ start timer """
   if sys.platform == "win32":
      return time.clock()
   else:
      return time.time()

Answer 1

You want to use timeit.default_timer, which does exactly that (get the most precise timer for the current platform).

To subtract 5 seconds, just subtract 5:

import timeit

timeit.default_timer() - 5

The time given is a float value representing seconds.