Convert string to timestamp python

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The Most Common way we use to store dates and times into a Database is in the form of a timestamp. When we receive a date and time in form of a string before storing it into a database, we convert that date and time string into a timestamp. Python provides various ways of converting the date to timestamp. Few of them discussed in this article are:

• Using timetuple()
• Using timestamp()

Using timetuple()

Approach:

• import datetime is use to import the date and time modules
• After importing date time module next step is to accept date string as an input and then store it into a variable
• Then we use strptime method. This method takes two arguments:
  • First argument is the string format of the date and time
  • Second argument is the format of the input string
• We convert date and time string into a date object
• Then we use timetuple() to convert date object into tuple
• At the end we use mktime(tuple) to convert the Date tuple into a timestamp.

Example 1:

import time

import datetime

string = "20/01/2020"

print(time.mktime(datetime.datetime.strptime(string,

                                             "%d/%m/%Y").timetuple()))

Output:

1579458600.0

Example 2:

import time

import datetime

string = "20/01/2020"

element = datetime.datetime.strptime(string,"%d/%m/%Y")

tuple = element.timetuple()

timestamp = time.mktime(tuple)

print(timestamp)

Output:

1579458600.0

Using timestamp()

Approach:

• import datetime is use to import the date and time modules
• After importing date time module next step is to accept date string as an input and then store it into a variable
• Then we use strptime method. This method takes two arguments
  • First arguments s the string format of the date and time
  • Second argument is the format of the input string
• Then it returns date and time value in timestamp format and we stored this in timestamp variable.

Example 1:

import time

import datetime

string = "20/01/2020"

element = datetime.datetime.strptime(string,"%d/%m/%Y")

timestamp = datetime.datetime.timestamp(element)

print(timestamp)

Output:

1579458600.0