Convert python datetime to epoch with strftime

Question

I have a time in UTC from which I want the number of seconds since epoch.

I am using strftime to convert it to the number of seconds. Taking 1st April 2012 as an example.

>>>datetime.datetime(2012,04,01,0,0).strftime('%s')
'1333234800'

1st of April 2012 UTC from epoch is 1333238400 but this above returns 1333234800 which is different by 1 hour.

So it looks like that strftime is taking my system time into account and applies a timezone shift somewhere. I thought datetime was purely naive?

How can I get around that? If possible avoiding to import other libraries unless standard. (I have portability concerns).

Answer 1

Return a datetime corresponding to a date_string in one of the formats emitted by date.isoformat() and datetime.isoformat(). Specifically, this function supports strings in the format(s) YYYY-MM-DD[*HH[:MM[:SS[.fff[fff]]]][+HH:MM[:SS[.ffffff]]]], where * can match any single character.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime.fromisoformat