Why is setInterval making infinite loops

Question

I'm trying to set a timer so it display the seconds and min left of an user and I'm using setInterval to get the seconds and if there are 60 seconds it will reduce 1 min from the user.
The thing is that I'm getting infinite for loops every time I try to do it.

Something like

var userObj = {
    name: "",
    min: 0,
    sec:0
}

function timerCount() {
    while (userObj.sec !== 0) {
        console.log(userObj.min)
        if (userObj.sec == 0) {
            setInterval(function() {
                userObj.min--;
                userObj.sec = 59     
            }, 1000);
        }
        while(userObj.sec !== 0) {
            setInterval(function() {
                console.log(userObj.sec)
                userObj.sec--;  
            }, 1000);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

var userObj = {
    name: "",
    min: 0,
    sec:5
}

function timerCount() {

  if(userObj.min === 0 && userObj.sec === 0) {
    return;
  }

  if (userObj.sec === 0) {
    userObj.min--;
      userObj.sec = 59     
    }     
  userObj.sec--;  


  setTimeout(timerCount, 1000)
}

timerCount()

With little effort we can remove those while loops that are causing the issue. We also want to check for the minutes and seconds equalling 0 so we know when to end our timer.

Answer 2

You put your setInterval inside a loop (and other things).

No need to separate time in minutes and seconds, just work with seconds and do some math.

Here is a code that works:

var userObj = {
    name: "Joe",
    sec: 3605
}

function timerCount()
{
    var interval = setInterval(function()
    {
        console.log(getTimeLeft(userObj.sec));
        userObj.sec--;
        if(userObj.sec == 0)
        {
            clearInterval(interval);
            console.log('NO MORE TIME');
        }
    }, 1000);
}

function getTimeLeft(sec)
{
    var seconds = Math.floor( sec % 60 );
    var minutes = Math.floor( (sec / 60) % 60 );
    var hours = Math.floor( (sec / 60 / 60) );

    return {
        'hours' : hours,
        'minutes': minutes,
        'seconds': seconds
    }
}

timerCount();

Answer 3

This is one more approach you could think of:

function timer(min, sec){   
    if (min === 0 && sec === 0) return;

    setTimeout(function(){
       console.log(min, sec);

       if (min > 0 && sec === 0) timer(min-1, 59);
       if (sec > 0) timer(min, sec-1);  
    }, 1000);
 }

You can invoke this timer:

timer(userObj.min, 0)