#!/usr/bin/python def seconds(timestring): multipliers = [24, 60, 60, 1] # days, hours, minutes, seconds time = map(int, re.compile('[^0-9]').split(timestring)) if len(time) > 4: raise Exception, 'specify time as days:hours:minutes:seconds, e.g. "0:1:2:3"' else: time = ([0, 0, 0, 0] + time)[-4:] # zero-pad it print >>sys.stderr, 'time:', time for i in range(len(time)): time[i] *= reduce(int.__mul__, multipliers[i:]) print >>sys.stderr, 'time:', time return sum(time) if __name__ == '__main__': import sys, re print seconds(sys.argv[1])