When one wants to measure the wall clock time of a code snippet, one usually do:

start = time.time()
# ...
# Some code we want to time
# ...
end = time.time()
elapsed = start - end # in secs
elapsed_ms = elapsed * 1000 # in ms

I find this quite heavy to read and un-pythonic. timer allows you to do the exact same thing with a context manager:

with Timer() as t:
    # Some code we want to time
print t.elapsed_s
print t.elapsed_ms

timer.Timer is a context manager with 5 attributes:

• default_timer: a platform specific timer function (time.time for Unix platforms and time.clock for Windows platforms)
• start: the time of the beginning of the execution of the code block, measured with default_timer
• end: the time of the end of the execution of the code block, measured with default_timer
• elapsed_s: the wall clock timing of the execution of the code block, in seconds
• elapsed_ms: the wall clock timing of the execution of the code block, in miliseconds

>>> from timer import Timer
>>> with Timer() as t:
... for i in xrange(10000000):
... pass
...
>>> print(t.start)
1341568310.06
>>> print(t.end)
1341568310.14
>>> print(t.elapsed_ms)
73.6618041992 # in miliseconds
>>> print(t.elapsed_s)
0.0736618041992 # in seconds