All the IPython Notebooks in this example series by Dr. Milan Parmar are available @ GitHub

Python Program to Create a Countdown Timer¶

In this example, you will learn to create a countdown timer.

To understand this example, you should have the knowledge of the following Python programming topics:

In [1]:

# Example 1: Countdown time in Python

import time

def countdown(time_sec):
    while time_sec:
        mins, secs = divmod(time_sec, 60)
        timeformat = '{:02d}:{:02d}'.format(mins, secs)
        print(timeformat, end='\r')
        time.sleep(1)
        time_sec -= 1

    print("stop")

countdown(5)

'''
>>Expected output:
     
00:05
00:04
00:03
00:02
00:01
stop1
'''

stop1

Out[1]:

'\n>>Expected output:\n     \n00:05\n00:04\n00:03\n00:02\n00:01\nstop1\n'

Explanation:

The divmod() method takes two numbers and returns a pair of numbers (a tuple) consisting of their quotient and remainder.

end='\r' overwrites the output for each iteration. The value of time_sec is decremented at the end of each iteration.

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