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
In Python 3.7
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
If you want to convert a python datetime to seconds since epoch you could do it explicitly:
>>> (datetime.datetime(2012,04,01,0,0) - datetime.datetime(1970,1,1)).total_seconds()
1333238400.0
In Python 3.3+ you can use timestamp() instead:
>>> datetime.datetime(2012,4,1,0,0).timestamp()
1333234800.0
Why you should not use datetime.strftime('%s')
Python doesn't actually support %s as an argument to strftime (if you check at http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior it's not in the list), the only reason it's working is because Python is passing the information to your system's strftime, which uses your local timezone.
>>> datetime.datetime(2012,04,01,0,0).strftime('%s')
'1333234800'