Function to convert seconds into minutes, hours, and days

This tidbit is useful for displaying elapsed time to varying degrees of granularity.

I personally think that questions of efficiency are practically meaningless here, so long as something grossly inefficient isn’t being done. Premature optimization is the root of quite a bit of evil. This is fast enough that it’ll never be your choke point.

intervals = (
    ('weeks', 604800),  # 60 * 60 * 24 * 7
    ('days', 86400),    # 60 * 60 * 24
    ('hours', 3600),    # 60 * 60
    ('minutes', 60),
    ('seconds', 1),
)

def display_time(seconds, granularity=2):
    result = []

    for name, count in intervals:
        value = seconds // count
        if value:
            seconds -= value * count
            if value == 1:
                name = name.rstrip('s')
            result.append("{} {}".format(value, name))
    return ', '.join(result[:granularity])

..and this provides decent output:

In [52]: display_time(1934815)
Out[52]: '3 weeks, 1 day'

In [53]: display_time(1934815, 4)
Out[53]: '3 weeks, 1 day, 9 hours, 26 minutes'