Convert an ISO 8601 timestamp to unix timestamp

iso2unix.py

import calendar

from iso8601 import parse_date

def iso2unix(timestamp):
    """
    Convert a UTC timestamp formatted in ISO 8601 into a UNIX timestamp
    """

    # use iso8601.parse_date to convert the timestamp into a datetime object.
    parsed = parse_date(timestamp)

    # now grab a time tuple that we can feed mktime
    timetuple = parsed.timetuple()

    # return a unix timestamp
    return calendar.timegm(timetuple)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    import time

    import pytz

    from datetime import datetime, timedelta

    utc = pytz.timezone('UTC')


    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        timestamp = sys.argv[1]
    else:
        utcnow = datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc)
        timestamp = utcnow.isoformat('T')

    print 'timestamp: %s' % timestamp

    unix_time = iso2unix(timestamp)
    print 'unix_time: %s' % unix_time

    print '\nsanity check ...\n'

    epoch = datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0)
    print 'epoch: %s' % (epoch,)

    delta = timedelta(seconds=unix_time)
    print 'delta: %s' % delta

    x = epoch + delta
    print 'epoch + delta: %s' % x

    print '\nlocal timestamps\n'

    localtime = time.localtime(unix_time)
    print 'localtime: %s' % (localtime,)

    gmtime = time.gmtime(unix_time)
    print 'gmtime: %s' % (gmtime,)

Modified version with changes suggested by Celada on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12378102/python-reliably-convert-a-8601-string-to-timestamp

So much simpler:

If you want to get the seconds since epoch, you can use python-dateutil to convert it to a datetime object and then convert it so seconds using the strftime method. Like so:

>>> import dateutil.parser as dp
>>> t = '1984-06-02T19:05:00.000Z'
>>> parsed_t = dp.parse(t)
>>> t_in_seconds = parsed_t.strftime('%s')
>>> t_in_seconds
'455047500'

from: http://stackoverflow.com/a/27246418/1224827