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  4. Python: Transforming Twitter Datetime String to Timestamp (z' is a Bad Directive in Format)

Python: Transforming Twitter Datetime String to Timestamp (z' is a Bad Directive in Format)

Mark Needham user avatar by
Mark Needham
·
Apr. 03, 15 · Interview
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I’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


twitter Strings Data Types Python (language) Directive (programming)

Published at DZone with permission of Mark Needham, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

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