Python | mktime overflow error

Question

I have been search all over the net and couldn't find an appropriate solution for this issue

OverflowError: mktime argument out of range

The code that causes this exception

 t = (1956, 3, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
 ser = time.mktime(t)

I would like to know the actual reason for this exception, some say that the date is not in a valid range but it doesn't make any sense to me, and if there's a range what it could be. Is it depends upon the system that we are using. Also would like to know a good solution for this issue.

Thanks.

Related: OSError: Errno 22 Invalid argument when using datetime.strptime — FObersteiner
– FObersteiner, Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 6:03

Tamás · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-22 14:49:33Z

28

time.mktime calls the underlying mktime function from the platform's C library. For instance, the above code that you posted works perfectly well for me on Mac OS X, although it returns a negative number as the date is before the Unix epoch. So the reason is that your platform's mktime implementation probably does not support dates before the Unix epoch. You can use Python's datetime module to construct a datetime object corresponding to the above date, subtract it from another datetime object that represents the Unix epoch and use the calculated timedelta object to get the number of seconds since the epoch:

from datetime import datetime
epoch = datetime(1970, 1, 1)
t = datetime(1956, 3, 2)
diff = t-epoch
print diff.days * 24 * 3600 + diff.seconds

Update: if you are using Python 2.7 or above, you could simply use print diff.total_seconds() as noted below in Chad Miller's comment.

edited Sep 22, 2015 at 14:49

answered Mar 25, 2010 at 19:42

Tamás

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2 Comments

Chad Miller Over a year ago

print diff.total_seconds()

Tamás Over a year ago

Thanks, I have updated my answer. Python 2.5 and 2.6 were far more prevalent in 2010 when I added this answer and total_seconds() is available from 2.7 onwards.

The Demz · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-02 14:17:57Z

python time module

Although this module is always available, not all functions are available on all platforms. Most of the functions defined in this module call platform C library functions with the same name. It may sometimes be helpful to consult the platform documentation, because the semantics of these functions varies among platforms.

The epoch is the point where the time starts, and is platform dependent. For Unix, the epoch is January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 (UTC). To find out what the epoch is on a given platform, look at time.gmtime(0).

https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html

Windows 10:

>>> time.gmtime(0)
time.struct_time(tm_year=1970, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0)

>>> list((ix for ix in time.gmtime(0)))
[1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 1, 0]

>>> time.mktime(time.gmtime(0))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OverflowError: mktime argument out of range

The C library function on windows 10 does not support times below a certain value.

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