Parse ISO-8601 dates into UTC seconds since epoch

iso8601-date-parsing.py

import calendar
import dateutil.parser
import time

def parseIso8601(timestr):
  """Parse `timestr` into UTC seconds since epoch."""
  dt = dateutil.parser.parse(timestr)
  if dt.tzinfo:
    return calendar.timegm(dt.utctimetuple())
  else:
    return time.mktime(dt.timetuple())