Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

Getting a Dictionary

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

>>> df
  BillMonth  InvoiceAmount
0       May            300
1      June            450
2      July            600
3    August            900

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The End of 2019

It's the end of 2019, and I want to have a countdown on the TV for a party tonight. I've written an application and then have this code set to run during the evening.

DECLARE @midnight TIME = '00:00:00';
DECLARE @now TIME = '16:00:00';
DECLARE @diff int;
WHILE DATEDIFF(SECOND,@midnight, @now) < 0
BEGIN 
  WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:01'
  SET @diff = DATEDIFF(SECOND, @midnight, @now)
  PRINT @now 
  SET @now = DATEADD(SECOND, 1, @now)
END
PRINT "Happy New Year"

I decide to test this and set now to 23:59:50, but when I run this, it never works. What should I change the WHILE loop equality test to be in order for this to work?

Answer: > 0

Explanation: When this runs, it looks at the difference between the current seconds and midnight. At midnight, seconds are 0. Until then, this counts up towards 86399. There are 86400 seconds in the day, but after 86399, this resets to 0. At 0, we get the Happy New Year. If we look at the output with >0, we see:

23:59:50.0000000
23:59:51.0000000
23:59:52.0000000
23:59:53.0000000
23:59:54.0000000
23:59:55.0000000
23:59:56.0000000
23:59:57.0000000
23:59:58.0000000
23:59:59.0000000
Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone. Be safe and enjoy yourselves.

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