Python Module “time”
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Python’s time module provides some very useful functions for working with time and dates.
One useful function is
sleep(), which pauses the program for a given number of seconds. I use this when I need to wait a fixed time period for physical events, such as a thermal soaking.The function
time()returns the local time in the ever-useful number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. An interesting quirk is that accuracy of smaller than a second is available on some operating systems and this function will actually return with a floating-point number. Use Python’sint()if this is not desirable.The functions
gmtime()andlocaltime()return the time in a 9-tuple which is somewhat unusual, however it can be handy for quickly extracting parts of the time. For example,time.localtime()[0]will return the four-digit year.
