How to convert YouTube API duration to seconds?

Question

For the sake of interest I want to convert video durations from YouTubes ISO 8601 to seconds. To future proof my solution, I picked a really long video to test it a

Answer 1

Python's built-in dateutil module only supports parsing ISO 8601 dates, not ISO 8601 durations. For that, you can use the "isodate" library (in pypi at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/isodate -- install through pip or easy_install). This library has full support for ISO 8601 durations, converting them to datetime.timedelta objects. So once you've imported the library, it's as simple as:

dur=isodate.parse_duration('P1W2DT6H21M32S')
print dur.total_seconds()