@Arhs your comment helped a lot, a single replace(x,'') to replace(x,' ') solved everything

And since it looks that there is no way to change the description of the kata I think a simple comment with those missing explanations on the top here (and on every kata with this type of problem too, the devs could just make a fixed comment) would serve as a second description.

Thirdly, I don’t think that it that in any way keeping the description of the kata somewhat confusing adds to the rank of the problem and compensates for the lack of complexity of the kata .

Yeah, I agree, that this shouldn't go that way. Something like that doesn't ever sucessfully pass the beta phase, these days. But here, it's that or having something ranked 4 while the task is 7-6... Honestly, there are imo only two valid ways to go out of this situation with this kata: either reranking it, or just retiring it. Unfortunaltely, so far, none of those are doable ('without going into details...).

Happy holidays to you too,
B4B

Hi,

1. No, that means that if what you count could lead to different valid answers, you can return any of them as long as it's consistent with the requirements (like: 3x a, 2x b, 2x c -> return either a,b,c or a,c,b)
2. what language are you using? (edit: python. Well, that won't be changed because of the last part of point 3, sorry)
3. don't mistake "vague description" with "people who don't understand what the description means". Here, the description is perfectly unambiguous about what to do and how, actually. The reason why it's not made more blatant is because of the rank of the kata (the task is closer to 7-6 kyu, but it has been approved a long time ago, and ranks cannot be changed anymore, bla-bla-bla (long, sad & repetitve story on cw, you'll see... ;) ))
4. I'm not sure who you're talking to. Maybe that's actually me, since I sort of "maintained" some language versions of this kata. x) Well, there are several things entangled here.
   • after some time it becomes somewhat... tiring to see people coming again and again with the exact same problems, that actually aren't and have already been explained a lot of time.
   • people tend to have "focused reading". I mean: "Oh, that message fits with what I have in mind, let's not read the answers below in case they would contradict that impression". x)
   • add to that the salty rank inconsistency problems and you get this kind of situation where every part get rather frustrated but nothing can really been done about it without messing something up even more... :s
   • I'm not the author of this kata
   • (and ppl sometime misread the tone of my messages... (and sometimes the tone isn't good, yeah. But well, if you look at the whole pricture, you'll see that with some users, it's actually appropriate x) ))
   • (and the fact that the kata was just a total mess before some users and myself went by, so the discourse is already cluttered with a lot of rants in the first place..., which gives a strong "orientation" to the way messages are read in the whole discourse and is increasing the "bad atmosphere")

Did that answer your questions appropriately?

Cheers

yeah, just checked his solution... for example:
print(format_duration(10)):

0 years, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes and 10 seconds

probably he passed it in prev versions where were bugs