Get An Epoch Time Stamp In Python

July 2021

Here's some code to get to epoch time in seconds:

import time

  from_epoch_to_now = int(time.time())

  print(from_epoch_to_now)

Output:

1662430968

This is how to get it for a specific time

import time
  from calendar import timegm

  utc_time = time.strptime("2020-11-11T21:20:31.807Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ")

  from_epoch_to_specific_time = timegm(utc_time)
  
  print(from_epoch_to_specific_time)

Output:

1605129631

The code below works too, but it sounds like it's not the ideal way to do it.

Old notes that need review

Python doesn't actually support %s as an argument to strftime (if you check at http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior it's not in the list), the only reason it's working is because Python is passing the information to your system's strftime, which uses your local timezone.

If you want to convert a python datetime to seconds since epoch you should do it explicitly:

>>> datetime.datetime(2012,04,01,0,0).strftime('%s')
'1333234800'

>>> (datetime.datetime(2012,04,01,0,0) - datetime.datetime(1970,1,1)).total_seconds()
1333238400.0

In Python 3.3+ you can use timestamp() instead:

>>> datetime.datetime(2012,4,1,0,0).timestamp()
1333234800.0

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