Understanding timedelta

Because timedelta is defined like:

class datetime.timedelta([days,] [seconds,] [microseconds,] [milliseconds,] [minutes,] [hours,] [weeks])

All arguments are optional and default to 0.

You can easily say "Three days and four milliseconds" with optional arguments that way.

>>> datetime.timedelta(days=3, milliseconds=4)
datetime.timedelta(3, 0, 4000)
>>> datetime.timedelta(3, 0, 0, 4) #no need for that.
datetime.timedelta(3, 0, 4000)

And for str casting, it returns a nice formatted value instead of __repr__ to improve readability. From docs:

str(t) Returns a string in the form [D day[s], ][H]H:MM:SS[.UUUUUU], where D is negative for negative t. (5)

>>> datetime.timedelta(seconds = 42).__repr__()
'datetime.timedelta(0, 42)'
>>> datetime.timedelta(seconds = 42).__str__()
'0:00:42'

Checkout documentation:

http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#timedelta-objects