Python: Number of seconds since midnight 1970.01.01 GMT to arbitrary time GMT?

Question

Having a difficult time with this, trying all these different date functions but no clue how to do it with any certainty.

Like in this question?: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3682748/converting-unix-timestamp-string-to-readable-date-in-python — Anders Lindahl, Jul 15 '12 at 05:53

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 15 '12 at 06:09

You can use calendar.timegm to get seconds since epoch. A time tuple is the required parameter and time.strptime can be used to generate that tuple.

Here is a quick example:

import calendar
import time

# Time in GMT
x = 'Sat Jul 14 22:05:54 2012'
y = time.strptime(x)
z = calendar.timegm(y)
print z # 1342303554 - the number of seconds since epoch

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 15 '12 at 06:10

The Unix timestamp is by definition in GMT (or rather UTC) format. You can use pythons datetime module and create a datetime object with timezone "None" by using the utcfromtimestamp constructor:

>>> print datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(300)
1970-01-01 00:05:00

If you use the fromtimestamp constructor, you will get a datetime object adjusted for the timezone of your environment (in my case UTC+1):

>>> print datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(300)
1970-01-01 01:05:00

Python: Number of seconds since midnight 1970.01.01 GMT to arbitrary time GMT?

2 Answers2