Converting Hours to Seconds in Python

A Beginner’s Guide to Writing a Simple Function

Photo by Elias Michel on Unsplash

Problem Statement

The problem we’re trying to solve is as follows:

Write a function that converts hours into seconds.

Here are some examples of how the function should work:

• how_many_seconds(2) ➞ 7200
• how_many_seconds(10) ➞ 36000
• how_many_seconds(24) ➞ 86400

Step 1: Understanding the Problem

Before we start writing any code, it’s essential to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. In this case, we need to create a function that takes one argument (the number of hours) and returns the equivalent number of seconds.

Step 2: Writing the Function

Now that we understand the problem, let’s start writing our function. We’ll call it how_many_seconds and define it with one parameter: hours.

def how_many_seconds(hours):
  # Our code will go here

Step 3: Converting Hours to Seconds

Inside the function, we’ll convert the hours to seconds. We can do this by simply multiplying the hours parameter by the number of seconds in an hour (3600).

def how_many_seconds(hours):
  seconds = hours * 3600

Step 4: Returning the Result

Now that we’ve converted the hours to seconds, we need to return the result from our function. We can do this using the return keyword followed by the variable seconds.

def how_many_seconds(hours):
  seconds = hours * 3600
  return seconds

That’s it! Our function is complete. Now, when we call how_many_seconds with a number of hours, it will return the equivalent number of seconds.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to solve the “Convert Hours into Seconds” problem in Python. We started by understanding the problem, then wrote a simple function called how_many_seconds that takes the number of hours as an argument. Inside the function, we converted the hours to…