Question

Let’s say I have a string like '2:19.83 blah blah...blah blah' where the format is minutes:seconds.centiseconds blah... and blah can represent any sequence of characters other than a newline.

I want to parse and get the number of seconds rounded down. So in the above example, the result would be 139.

What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

I would first get the time portion from the string

>>> newstring=s.split('.',1)[0]

Then I would read it using strptime…

>>> tt=time.strptime(newstring,"%M:%S")

and then finally, get the time in seconds.

>>> tt.tm_min * 60 + tt.tm_sec

Not a 1-liner, but pretty simple…