Pythons Project for beginners - Post 28: Simple Digital Clock
- Anubhav Somani
- Sep 6
- 2 min read
Let's build a Simple Digital Clock that runs in your console. This is a great project for learning how to work with time, control the terminal, and create a program that runs continuously.
First, here is the explanation of how the project is built.
How the "Simple Digital Clock" is Made
The Core Idea: The goal is to create a program that displays the current time and updates it every second, right in the command line. This mimics a real digital clock.
Required Modules: This project uses two important modules that come built-in with Python:
time: We need this module for two things: to get the current time and to make our program pause for one second between updates (time.sleep(1)).
os: The "operating system" module allows us to interact with the terminal. Specifically, we'll use it to clear the console screen before printing the new time, which creates the illusion that the time is updating in place.
The Main Loop: To make the clock run forever, we use a while True loop. This creates an infinite loop that will only stop when the user manually closes the program.
Getting and Formatting the Time: Inside the loop, the first step is to get the current time. The time.strftime() function is perfect for this. It lets you format the time into a human-readable string. We'll use the format string "%H:%M:%S" to get the hour, minute, and second.
Clearing the Screen: This is the trick that makes the clock look clean. Before we print the new time, we need to clear whatever was on the screen before. We can do this with os.system('cls') on Windows or os.system('clear') on macOS and Linux. A simple if statement can check the operating system and use the correct command.
Displaying the Time and Pausing:
After clearing the screen, we print() the formatted time string.
To ensure our clock updates only once per second, we then call time.sleep(1). This tells the program to do nothing for exactly one second before the loop starts over.
Handling a Clean Exit: An infinite loop will run forever. The standard way for a user to stop a command-line program is by pressing Ctrl+C. This action raises a KeyboardInterrupt error in Python. To make our program exit gracefully instead of showing an error message, we can wrap our entire while loop in a try...except KeyboardInterrupt block. In the except block, we can simply print a "Goodbye!" message.
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