Convert date string to timestamp in Python

The Most Common way we use to store dates and times into a Database is in the form of a timestamp.

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()

Convert date string to 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:

Python3

# Python program to convert
# date to timestamp


import time
import datetime


string = "20/01/2020"
print(time.mktime(datetime.datetime.strptime(string,
                                            "%d/%m/%Y").timetuple()))

Output:

1579458600.0

Time complexity: O(1)
Auxiliary space: O(1)

Example 2:

Python3

# Python program to convert
# date to timestamp



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

Time complexity: O(1)
Auxiliary space: O(1)

Convert date string to timestamp 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:

Python3

# Python program to convert
# date to timestamp


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