Question

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

Answer 1

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