Question

time.time() gives current time in seconds from a given reference. Is there a mean to convert a date to a number of seconds since given reference?

I thought of calendar.timegm(), but I am not sure how to format the argument.

thanks!

Answer 1

calendar.timegm is the good approach. Just pass it the utctimetuple() output from your datetime object:

from datetime import datetime
import pytz
import calendar

dt = datetime.now(pytz.utc)
secs = calendar.timegm(dt.utctimetuple())
print dt, secs

prints

2012-03-09 09:17:14.698500+00:00 1331284634

just to test it against the epoch:

print calendar.timegm(datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, tzinfo=pytz.utc).utctimetuple())

prints 0.