I need to convert a date from a string (entered into a url) in the form of 12/09/2008-12:40:49. Obviously, I'll need a UNIX Timestamp at the end of it, but before I get that I need the Date object first.
How do I do this? I can't find any resources that show the date in that format? Thank you.
You can use the time.strptime() method to parse a date string. This will return a time_struct that you can pass to time.mktime() (when the string represents a local time) or calendar.timegm() (when the string is a UTC time) to get the number of seconds since the epoch.
You need the strptime method. If you're on Python 2.5 or higher, this is a method on datetime, otherwise you have to use a combination of the time and datetime modules to achieve this.
Python 2.5 up:
from datetime import datetime
dt = datetime.strptime(s, "%d/%m/%Y-%H:%M:%S")
below 2.5:
from datetime import datetime
from time import strptime
dt = datetime(*strptime(s, "%d/%m/%Y-%H:%M:%S")[0:6])