Convert python datetime to timestamp in milliseconds

Question

How to convert a human readable time with the format 20.12.2016 09:38:42,76 to Unix timestamps in milliseconds? I found a lot of similar questions, but didn't found this specific question/answer.

Answer 1

In Python 3 this can be done in 2 steps:

1. Convert timestring to datetime object
2. Multiply the timestamp of the datetime object 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 on the left.

Answer 2

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)