Add total_seconds() method to datetime.time object

[MirrorAzure]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

It often happens that when working with datetime.time objects, user has to write custom constructions to get the number of seconds from the time object, like that:

>>> time_object = time(hour=5)
>>> total_seconds = time_object.hour * 3600 + time_object.minute * 60 + time_object.second
>>> print(total_seconds)
18000

It would be convenient to have a method that returns total number of seconds of time object
Example:

>>> time_object = time(hour=5)
>>> total_seconds = time_object.total_seconds()
>>> print(total_seconds)
18000

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

No response given

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-125435: Add total_seconds() method to datetime.time #125433

[erlend-aasland]

This functionality is present in the timedelta class:

>>> import datetime
>>> t = datetime.timedelta(hours=5)
>>> t.total_seconds()
18000.0

[pganssle]

The time object does not represent an amount of time, it represents an instant on the clock. Like Erlend says, use timedelta if you want to represent an amount of time.

Thank you for taking the time to write a well-formatted request with an accompanying PR! I hate to close issues and PRs like this because they clearly represent the kind of effort that I prefer to encourage, but unfortunately this one is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the time class, and if we were to implement it it would propagate this misunderstanding. Please do not let this discourage you from further reports and PRs in the future.

[MirrorAzure]

Thanks for the feedback.
In general, I understand why you are not going to implement this functionality. Perhaps I myself misunderstood the purpose of the datetime.time object.
I wanted to suggest my improvement, since I had a task to calculate the difference in seconds between two timestamps, for which I used datetime.time (it might have been more correct to use datetime.datetime, but the date was irrelevant in the context of the task).