Today I’m gonna show you a secret ninja technique to extract hours, minutes and seconds from a number (representing an amount of seconds). In my example I will show an Actionscript code, but this can be implemented in JavaScript and maybe other languages too.
So, the scenario is the following: we have a number representing seconds and we want to know how many hours this amount of seconds contains, how many minutes and how many remaining seconds. We know that a minute is composed by 60 seconds and an hour by 60 minutes and we could write a series of maths operations in order to accomplish our objective, but there is a way far simple and fast: use the Date class!
Date class already implements all the methods we need:
- getHours()
- getMinutes()
- getSeconds()
So, in order to take advantage of these useful methods, all we have to do is initialize a “fake” date using the amount of seconds we want to “split” into hours, minutes and seconds. The Date class has several OPTIONAL arguments that can be specified during its initializations, these are:
- year
- month
- date (day number)
- hours
- minutes
- seconds
- milliseconds
Because theme all are optional, we can create a date object by specifying only the know arguments (in our case seconds) and by assigning null or zero to the others:
1 | var date:Date = new Date(null, null, null, 0, 0, 9137); |
Then by calling getHours, getMinutes and getSeconds we will obtain what we expect:
1 2 3 | trace("hours: ", date.getHours()); // 2 hours trace("minutes: ", date.getMinutes()); // 32 minutes trace("seconds: ", date.getSeconds()); // 17 seconds |
Not sure about the result? Let’s test it:
60 * 60 * 2 = 7200; (seconds contained in 2 hours)
32 * 60 = 1920; (seconds contained in 32 minutes)
7200 + 1920 + 17 = 9137; (original seconds!)
