datetime – Convert string date to timestamp in Python

>>> import time
>>> import datetime
>>> s = 01/12/2011
>>> time.mktime(datetime.datetime.strptime(s, %d/%m/%Y).timetuple())
1322697600.0

I use ciso8601, which is 62x faster than datetimes strptime.

t = 01/12/2011
ts = ciso8601.parse_datetime(t)
# to get time in seconds:
time.mktime(ts.timetuple())

You can learn more here.

>>> int(datetime.datetime.strptime(01/12/2011, %d/%m/%Y).strftime(%s))
1322683200