Format timedelta to string

You can just convert the timedelta to a string with str(). Here's an example:

import datetime
start = datetime.datetime(2009,2,10,14,00)
end   = datetime.datetime(2009,2,10,16,00)
delta = end - start
print(str(delta))
# prints 2:00:00

As you know, you can get the total_seconds from a timedelta object by accessing the .seconds attribute.

Python provides the builtin function divmod() which allows for:

s = 13420
hours, remainder = divmod(s, 3600)
minutes, seconds = divmod(remainder, 60)
print('{:02}:{:02}:{:02}'.format(int(hours), int(minutes), int(seconds)))
# result: 03:43:40

or you can convert to hours and remainder by using a combination of modulo and subtraction:

# arbitrary number of seconds
s = 13420
# hours
hours = s // 3600 
# remaining seconds
s = s - (hours * 3600)
# minutes
minutes = s // 60
# remaining seconds
seconds = s - (minutes * 60)
# total time
print('{:02}:{:02}:{:02}'.format(int(hours), int(minutes), int(seconds)))
# result: 03:43:40

>>> str(datetime.timedelta(hours=10.56))
10:33:36

>>> td = datetime.timedelta(hours=10.505) # any timedelta object
>>> ':'.join(str(td).split(':')[:2])
10:30

Passing the timedelta object to the str() function calls the same formatting code used if we simply type print td. Since you don't want the seconds, we can split the string by colons (3 parts) and put it back together with only the first 2 parts.

def td_format(td_object):
    seconds = int(td_object.total_seconds())
    periods = [
        ('year',        60*60*24*365),
        ('month',       60*60*24*30),
        ('day',         60*60*24),
        ('hour',        60*60),
        ('minute',      60),
        ('second',      1)
    ]

    strings=[]
    for period_name, period_seconds in periods:
        if seconds > period_seconds:
            period_value , seconds = divmod(seconds, period_seconds)
            has_s = 's' if period_value > 1 else ''
            strings.append("%s %s%s" % (period_value, period_name, has_s))

    return ", ".join(strings)