utc string to unix time conversion python

Question

I have a list of UTC time stamps stored as string format as follows:

'20170124T1815'

Is there a function in python to convert these strings to unix time? I have tried:

dt = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
calendar.timegm(dt.utctimetuple())
(datetime.datetime.utcnow('20170127T2131').strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'))

but these have not been working for me as these functions are not meant to take arguments.

Laurent LAPORTE · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-22T20:09:09.137

4

You need to convert the string '20170124T1815' to a datetime instance:

import datetime

dt = datetime.datetime.strptime('20170124T1815', '%Y%m%dT%H%M')

Then use timestamp() method to convert to UNIX time:

ut = dt.timestamp()
# -> 1485281700.0

The documentation:

datetime.timestamp()

Return POSIX timestamp corresponding to the datetime instance. The return value is a float similar to that returned by time.time().

EDIT

For Python version < 3.3, you can use:

ut = (dt - datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1)).total_seconds()

Or, you can use:

import time

ut = time.mktime(dt.timetuple())

Thanks to Peter DeGlopper

edited May 22 '17 at 20:09

answered May 22 '17 at 19:43

Laurent LAPORTE

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Thank you, but I am getting an error saying AttributeError: 'datetime.datetime' object has no attribute 'timestamp' – coja7723 May 22 '17 at 19:52
I have only imported datetime – coja7723 May 22 '17 at 19:53
`timestamp()` is new in version 3.3. Which version of Python do you use? – Laurent LAPORTE May 22 '17 at 19:54
I am using python 2.7 – coja7723 May 22 '17 at 19:56
1

For versions without `.timestamp()` I prefer `time.mktime(dt.timetuple())`. – Peter DeGlopper May 22 '17 at 20:04
@PeterDeGlopper Yes, I only copy and adapt the solution presented in the documentation. – Laurent LAPORTE May 22 '17 at 20:09
`(dt - datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1)).total_seconds()` returns timestamp from UTC (good) and keeps subsecond precision, `time.mktime(dt.timetuple())` returns timestamp from local time (bad) and truncates to seconds. – Doncho Gunchev Dec 14 '21 at 00:52

utc string to unix time conversion python

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