Question

I’ve been struggling to determine how I can generate a POSIX (UNIX) time value for today and yesterday (midnight) via Python. I created this code, but keep stumbling with how to convert them to a POSIX value:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import time
today_string = datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d 00:00:00')
yesterday_string = (datetime.now() - timedelta(0)).strftime('%Y-%m-%d 00:00:00')

today = datetime.strptime(today_string, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
yesterday = datetime.strptime(yesterday_string, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

print time.mktime(today).timetuple()

This code yields an exception:

TypeError: argument must be 9-item sequence, not datetime.datetime

At this point, I’m at my wits end. Any help you can provide is appreciated.

Answer 1

You should apply the timetuple() method to the today object, not to the result of time.mktime(today):

>>> time.mktime(today.timetuple())
1345845600.0

By the way, I’m wrong or yesterday will be equal to today in your code?

edit:
To obtain the POSIX time for today you can simply do:

time.mktime(datetime.date.today().timetuple())