Python: Transforming Twitter Datetime String to Timestamp (z' is a Bad Directive in Format)
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Join For FreeI’ve been playing around with importing Twitter data into Neo4j and since Neo4j can’t store dates natively just yet I needed to convert a date string to timestamp.
I started with the following which unfortunately throws an exception:
from datetime import datetime date = "Sat Mar 14 18:43:19 +0000 2015" >>> datetime.strptime(date, "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 317, in _strptime (bad_directive, format)) ValueError: 'z' is a bad directive in format '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y'
%z is actually a valid option used to extract the timezone but my googling suggests it not working is one of the idiosyncrasies of strptime.
I eventually came across the python-dateutil library, as recommended by Joe Shaw on StackOverflow.
Using that library the problem is suddenly much simpler:
$ pip install python-dateutil
from dateutil import parser parsed_date = parser.parse(date) >>> parsed_date datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 14, 18, 43, 19, tzinfo=tzutc())
To get to a timestamp we can use calendar as I’ve described before:
import calendar timestamp = calendar.timegm(parser.parse(date).timetuple()) >>> timestamp 1426358599
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