How do I convert a human-readable time such as 20.12.2016 09:38:42,76 to a Unix timestamp in milliseconds?
7 Answers
In Python 3 this can be done in 2 steps:
- Convert timestring to
datetimeobject - Multiply the timestamp of the
datetimeobject by 1000 to convert it to milliseconds.
For example like this:
from datetime import datetime
dt_obj = datetime.strptime('20.12.2016 09:38:42,76',
'%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S,%f')
millisec = dt_obj.timestamp() * 1000
print(millisec)
Output:
1482223122760.0
strptime accepts your timestring and a format string as input. The timestring (first argument) specifies what you actually want to convert to a datetime object. The format string (second argument) specifies the actual format of the string that you have passed.
Here is the explanation of the format specifiers from the official documentation:
%d- Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number.%m- Month as a zero-padded decimal number.%Y- Year with century as a decimal number%H- Hour (24-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number.%M- Minute as a zero-padded decimal number.%S- Second as a zero-padded decimal number.%f- Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded to 6 digits.
For those who search for an answer without parsing and losing milliseconds,
given dt_obj is a datetime:
python3 only, elegant
int(dt_obj.timestamp() * 1000)
both python2 and python3 compatible:
import time
int(time.mktime(dt_obj.utctimetuple()) * 1000 + dt_obj.microsecond / 1000)
Comments
For Python2.7 - modifying MYGz's answer to not strip milliseconds:
from datetime import datetime
d = datetime.strptime("20.12.2016 09:38:42,76", "%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S,%f").strftime('%s.%f')
d_in_ms = int(float(d)*1000)
print(d_in_ms)
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(float(d)))
Output:
1482248322760
2016-12-20 09:38:42.760000
Comments
You need to parse your time format using strptime.
>>> import time
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> ts, ms = '20.12.2016 09:38:42,76'.split(',')
>>> ts
'20.12.2016 09:38:42'
>>> ms
'76'
>>> dt = datetime.strptime(ts, '%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S')
>>> time.mktime(dt.timetuple())*1000 + int(ms)*10
1482223122760.0
Comments
For Python2.7
You can format it into seconds and then multiply by 1000 to convert to millisecond.
from datetime import datetime
d = datetime.strptime("20.12.2016 09:38:42,76", "%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S,%f").strftime('%s')
d_in_ms = int(d)*1000
print(d_in_ms)
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(float(d)))
Output:
1482206922000
2016-12-20 09:38:42
6 Comments
Tom
Hey, thanks! I copy and paste your code and got a "ValueError: Invalid format string".
Mohammad Yusuf
@Tom Python version? It's working for me on Python2.7.6
Tom
I am using Python 2.7.12.
Decko
That strips out the ,76 though so it does not solve the problem.
PageNotFound
It will ignore millisecond in string. And won't solve the problem.
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Simple python 2.7 / 3 solution for converting python datetime to timestamp (as int) as title suggests. Use datetime.strptime to convert string to datetime object if your input is a string.
from datetime import datetime
dt_obj = datetime.utcnow() # input datetime object
milliseconds
int(float(dt_obj.strftime('%s.%f')) * 1e3)
1656096296215
microseconds
int(float(dt_obj.strftime('%s.%f')) * 1e6)
1656096296215242
Comments
A lot of these answers don't preserve the milliseconds from the datetime. This works for me
def datetime_to_ms_epoch(dt):
microseconds = time.mktime(dt.timetuple()) * 1000000 + dt.microsecond
return int(round(microseconds / float(1000)))
datetime.datetime.strptime. See the docs.