In Python, how can I turn this format into a unix timestamp?

Question

Mon Jul 09 09:20:28 +0000 2012

If I have a format like that as a STRING, how can I turn it into a unix timestamp?

Note: I'm getting this format from Twitter's API:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=twitter

You'll need to parse it: http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior — Blender, Jul 09 '12 at 20:16
see this http://devpython.com/2011/08/11/convert-utc-date-string-to-unix-timestamp/ — Ashwini Chaudhary, Jul 09 '12 at 20:18
@Blender: The OP's format seems to be tricky. For the `+0000` he needs `%z` but that results in `ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y'` — ThiefMaster, Jul 09 '12 at 20:22
@ThiefMaster, it looks like it works using Python3.2 (at least Portable Python). Apparently it depends on your underlying implementation of C: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2609259/converting-string-to-datetime-object-in-python — Wayne Werner, Jul 09 '12 at 20:35

ThiefMaster · Answer 1 · 2012-07-09T20:37:15.783

The best option is using dateutil.parser.parse() which gives you a datetime object with proper timezone information:

>>> import dateutil.parser
>>> dt = dateutil.parser.parse('Mon Jul 09 09:20:28 +0200 2012')
>>> dt
datetime.datetime(2012, 7, 9, 9, 20, 28, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 7200))

Now you just need to convert it to a UNIX timestamp:

>>> import time
>>> int(time.mktime(dt.timetuple()))
1341822028

The format you have can also be easily parsed using email.utils.parsedate_tz:

>>> import datetime
>>> import email.utils
>>> parts = email.utils.parsedate_tz('Mon Jul 09 09:20:28 +0200 2012')
>>> dt = datetime.datetime(*parts[:6]) - datetime.timedelta(seconds=parts[-1])
>>> str(dt)
'2012-07-09 07:20:28'

This is actually how email.utils.parsedate_to_datetime in Python 3.3 is implemented (if you want to copy&paste this into your project, replace __parsedate_tz with parsedate_tz from email.utils):

def parsedate_to_datetime(data):
    if not data:
        return None
    *dtuple, tz = __parsedate_tz(data)
    if tz is None:
        return datetime.datetime(*dtuple[:6])
    return datetime.datetime(*dtuple[:6],
            tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=tz)))

Andre Blum · Answer 2 · 2012-07-09T20:38:42.323

If the timezone is known to be always +0000, you can use:

time.strptime('Mon Jul 09 09:20:28 +0000 2012', '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y')

This returns a datetime structure. If you need unix seconds since epoch, run through time.mktime(), like this:

>>> time.mktime(time.strptime('Mon Jul 09 09:20:28 +0000 2012', '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y'))
1341818428.0

or time.gmtime() if indeed the timezone is always UTC.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 09 '12 at 20:17

0

datetime.strptime()

Reference: http://docs.python.org/library/time.html#time.strptime

answered Jul 09 '12 at 20:17

Daniel Li

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So, why not include some example code that actually parses the format he used without an error? – ThiefMaster Jul 09 '12 at 20:20
then you need to convert to unix timestamp... see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2775864/python-datetime-to-unix-timestamp @thiefmaster ... I think that hope's answer is sufficient to get him where he wants to be as well as allowing him to figure it out for other formats – Joran Beasley Jul 09 '12 at 20:21
@JoranBeasley: See my comment on the question. His format is apparently not *that* trivial to parse. – ThiefMaster Jul 09 '12 at 20:24
its real easy if he removes the offset(with regex or splits or replace or whatever) and just adds it at the end (or ignore it totally...especially if it is always +0000) – Joran Beasley Jul 09 '12 at 20:29

In Python, how can I turn this format into a unix timestamp?

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