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Discussion on: Improving my counter

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aleksandrhovhannisyan profile image
Aleksandr Hovhannisyan • Edited
  1. Consider using String.prototype.padStart: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W....

  2. You don't currently do anything with hours in the JavaScript, so that's why it's not changing. You're only setting the minutes and seconds. You'll need to get a reference to the hours label like you did with minutes and seconds and then set it to be parseInt(totalSeconds / 3600).

  3. Why do this? if (!!document.getElementById("counter"). Just do this: if (document.getElementById("counter")). Applying the negation operator twice is the same thing as not applying it at all.

Regarding this concern:

The numbers jump around

What do you mean? It may be helpful to include a link to a jsfiddle with all of your HTML, CSS, and JS so we can run it on our end.

One final thing to note: You don't need totalMinutes. Given a number of seconds, the number of minutes it represents is equal to parseInt(totalSeconds / 60) % 60. Since you're tallying the seconds, you don't need to also tally the minutes.

Improved code: jsfiddle.net/41o7tz3n/6/.

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granttransition profile image
Grant Smith • Edited

This is fantastic, thank you. As for the numbers jumping around, I posted a gif at the top of the post. It is hopefully attached below, although this isn't that important.

One important thing though (customer request), I need the numbers to start from 01:34:06. Using your method, how would you set the starting numbers?

New Timer

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aleksandrhovhannisyan profile image
Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

how would you set the starting numbers

Just in the HTML, if it's a fixed start. Otherwise you can just use JS to allow users to enter a start time.

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granttransition profile image
Grant Smith • Edited

Yeah, that is exactly what I have done. Page loads with 01:32:20 and then changes the timer to 00:00:20.

<div class="column is-8 counter_container">
 <span id="hours" class="counter_number">01</span>
 <img class="divider" src="dist/svg/counter-divider.svg" alt="Counter divider" width="16" height="60">
 <span id="minutes" class="counter_number">32</span>
 <img class="divider" src="dist/svg/counter-divider.svg" alt="Counter divider" width="16" height="60">
 <span id="seconds" class="counter_number">20</span>
</div>

I'll keep working at it, the help is much appreciated, thank you