Question

python’s time module seems a little haphazard. For example, here is a list of methods in there, from the docstring:

time() -- return current time in seconds since the Epoch as a float clock() -- return CPU time since process start as a float sleep() -- delay for a number of seconds given as a float gmtime() -- convert seconds since Epoch to UTC tuple localtime() -- convert seconds since Epoch to local time tuple asctime() -- convert time tuple to string ctime() -- convert time in seconds to string mktime() -- convert local time tuple to seconds since Epoch strftime() -- convert time tuple to string according to format specification strptime() -- parse string to time tuple according to format specification tzset() -- change the local timezone 

Looking at localtime() and its inverse mktime(), why is there no inverse for gmtime() ?

Bonus questions: what would you name the method ? How would you implement it ?

Answer 1

There is actually an inverse function, but for some bizarre reason, it’s in the calendar module: calendar.timegm(). I listed the functions in this answer.