RFC 7231-compliant (HTTP-date) timestamp in Python

rfc7231_timestamp.py

import time
from wsgiref.handlers import format_date_time

# now
print format_date_time(time.time())

# epoch seconds
print format_date_time(1514764800)

If you have an UTC date time object, you can use:

import datetime
from wsgiref.handlers import format_date_time

d = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
print(format_date_time(d.timestamp()))
# -> Mon, 26 Apr 2021 05:02:58 GMT

Regards
– Laurent.

This is how I did it:

from datetime import datetime

print(datetime.utcnow().strftime("%a, %d %b %G %T %Z"))
# -> Wed, 13 Apr 2022 10:12:21 

Cheers

To convert a RFC 7231 string to datetime, I used the following:

from datetime import datetime
datetime.strptime('Mon, 06 Feb 2023 07:03:53 GMT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')

which produced:

datetime.datetime(2023, 2, 6, 7, 3, 53)

You can do something like convert from RFC 7231 to ISO format:
datetime.strptime('Mon, 06 Feb 2023 07:03:53 GMT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z').isoformat()

'2023-02-06T07:03:53'
You'll want to add a trailing 'Z' if the ISO timestamp is in UTC, something Python doesn't properly handle. Don't assume your timestamp is automatically UTC.