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For quick and dirty benchmarking, timeit.main() is one of the handiest
tools out there, but calling it from Python code is a little tedious
since you need to construct a fake list of command line arguments in
order to call it.
What would be nice is a convenience function that accepted appropriate
arguments, with timeit.main being refactored to parse the command line
arguments and then call the new convenience function.
Possible API:
def measure(stmt="pass", setup="pass", timer=default_timer,
 repeat=default_repeat, number=default_number,
 verbosity=0, precision=3)
The new function would cover the latter section of the current main()
function, starting from the line "t = Timer(stmt, setup, timer)".

It would be even better if you could pass a locals or globals
dictionnary instead of the "setup" arg.
And even even better if it could implicitly get the locals/globals from
the calling frame :-)

See related discussion in issue 2527 and issue 1397474.

Close in favour of #6422 - that one at least has a patch :)

Don't understand how #6422 addresses this - would also like to see a more convenient API for timing; at present CLI gives a nice formatted output, and timeit.timeit gives just the raw timing in seconds. 
Would be easy to implement by simply refactoring main() in to the command line parsing component (first ~ 50 lines from https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/timeit.py#L256 to ~https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/timeit.py#L312 ) and actual timing and printing component, which could then be called via API. 
Am happy to work this up if this can be reopened...?

More specifically, #6422 also mentions at least in part this functionality, but the main focus there seems to be the autorange function. 
Propose splitting these two by reopening this use.