Question

I want to parse a timestamp from a log file that has been written via

datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S')

and then compute the number of seconds that have passed since this timestamp.

I know I could do it with datetime.datetime.strptime to get back a datetime object and then compute a timedelta. Problem is, the strptime function has been introduced with Python 2.5 and I’m using Python2.4.4 (an upgrade is not possible in my context).

Any easy way to do this?

Answer 1

>>> ts = time.mktime(time.strptime('20040412234551', '%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
>>> ts
1081809951.0
>>> datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts)
datetime.datetime(2004, 4, 12, 23, 45, 51)