total time components

[Soviut]

It would be really handy to be able to get the totalSeconds, totalMinutes, etc. from a duration.

const { totalSeconds } = parse(duration)

I have a use case for this where we're normalizing the length of different media to seconds and one of the formats is an ISO duration. Currently I have to parse the duration, then convert all the components to seconds then add them up.

const durationToSeconds = (duration: string): number => {
  const parsed = parse(duration)

  const totalSeconds =
    (parsed.hours ?? 0) * 3600 +
    (parsed.minutes ?? 0) * 60 +
    (parsed.seconds ?? 0)

  return totalSeconds ?? 0
}

[MelleB]

Great suggestion! The implementation is not directly trivial I think: You'd need to take into account the week/month/day components as well which opens up an interesting can of worms:

• Years: how do we deal with leap-years?
• Months: How many days to use?
• Days: Time zone differences?

The Temporal approach is to use a relativeTo option in this situation: https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/duration.html#total

I would be open for a PR.

Some quality constraints:

• This should not load automatically with the rest of the code, since not all users of the lib need it
• It needs to be tested extensively, maybe we can re-use/learn/steal from the Temporal tests here?

[Soviut]

That's true, once the date components are incorporated the is some ambiguity.

The way I'm thinking of these durations is the play time of a video. There is no relativity in that case; just a representation of the length of the media.

• Given the lack of relativity, we could assume no leap years so a fixed 365 days.
• We can assume that months map to the calendar, 4 months means Jan (31) + Feb (31) + Mar (31) + Apr (30).
  • it's possible to avoid this ambiguity by representing it as hours or days (eg: 720H, 30D)
• Given the lack of relativity, we assume UTC so days are always 24 hours.
• Likewise, weeks are 7 days.

The only one I think is truly contentious is the assumption made about the months. However, that particular behaviour can be outlined in the docs.