Converting timestamp to unix date python

python 2.7 strptime() does not support z directive, either you can use python 3.2+ or some other 3rd party library like dateutil.

For Python 2.7 use arrow:

import arrow    
date_str = "2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141+00:00"
unix_time = arrow.get(date_str).timestamp

On PY3 (verified on 3.4), using only standard libs

The date string you show will not be parsed by the standard python datetime library since it has a colon in the timezone (see here). The colon can be easily removed since it's always in the same position (or use rfind to find its index starting from the right). Your simplest solution is:

import datetime

date_str = "2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141+00:00"

date_str_no_colon = date_str[:-3]+date_str[-2:] # remove last colon
dt_obj = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_str_no_colon, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f%z")
unix_time = dt_obj.timestamp()

Note that arrow should still work with PY3, and is a better solution in general- you don't want to get into datetime parsing wars with python. It will win.

The way to parse the date is not right. You'll either need to parse it by hand, find another library (for example the dateutil.parser.parse method that will parse your string directly without supplying format string) that supports that format or make the timestamp in another format. Even with newer versions of python the %z directive does not accept TZ offsets in the +/-HH:MM format (with colon).

As the source of the timestamp is django.DateTimeField maybe this question can help?

For converting to unix timestamp you seem to have to do some work since there does not seem to be a direct method for that:

(t - datetime.utcfromtimestamp(0)).total_seconds()

where t is the datetime (assuming it's in UTC and there is no tzinfo) you want to convert to POSIX timestamp. If the assumption is not correct you need to put tzinfo in the zero timestamp you subtract as shown below where the assumption does not hold.

If you want to use dateutil.parser the complete solution would be:

(dateutil.parser.parse(timestamp) - datetime.utcfromtimestamp(0).replace(tzinfo=utc()).total_seconds()

strptime() has no support for timezones. So, you can make the conversion ignoring the timezone in the following way:

datetime.strptime("2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141", "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M:%S.%f").strftime("%s")
'1437102111'

Or in order to avoid using %s, as suggested below in the commments :

from datetime import datetime
(datetime.strptime("2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141", "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M:%S.%f") - datetime(1970, 1, 1)).total_seconds()
1437112911.066141

Notice this is a working version for Python 2, you can also check solutions for other versions here

Otherwise, you will have to use other libraries (django.utils or email.utils) that support timezones, or implement the timezone parsing on your own.

P.S. :

strptime docs appear to have support for timezone, but in fact it has not been implemented. Try :

datetime.strptime("2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141+00:00", "%Y-%m-%d %I:%M:%S.%f%z").strftime("%s")

and you will see that it is not supported. You can also verify it by searching more about strptime()

There are two parts:

• to convert "2015-07-17 06:01:51.066141+00:00" into a datetime object that represents UTC time, see Convert timestamps with offset to datetime obj using strptime. Or If you know that the utc offset is always +0000:

  from datetime import datetime
  
  utc_time = datetime.strptime(time_string, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f+00:00")
  

• to convert the UTC time to POSIX timestamp (unix time), see Converting datetime.date to UTC timestamp in Python:

  from datetime import datetime
  
  timestamp = (utc_time - datetime(1970, 1, 1)).total_seconds()