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 exa
import time from datetime import datetime now = datetime.now() # same as above except keeps microseconds time.mktime(now.timetuple()) + now.microsecond * 1e-6
(Sorry, it wouldn't let me comment on existing answer)